Major earthquakes strike near north and south poles
From increased ice melt reported from the Greenland Ice sheet to the sublimation of methyl hydrates near Spitsbergen, to an increased number of swarms and large earthquakes; the dynamics of the Arctic Circle is quickly and ominously morphing.
August 30, 2012 – ARCTIC CIRCLE - A powerful 6.8 magnitude earthquake erupted in the Jan Mayen Island region of the Arctic Circle, north of Iceland. The earthquake had a depth of 9.9 km (6.2 miles) and was followed by a 5.2 magnitude aftershock. Seismic turbulence has been increasing in the Arctic Circle in the month of August, as seen from the map above. On August 14, a – 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck in the Sea of Okhotsk near NE Russia. Today’s 6.8 magnitude Arctic earthquake was preceded by double moderate tremors along the Western Indian-Antarctica Ridge in the 5.4 and 5.0 range. The seismic dynamism that has the planet reeling, from pole to pole, increases the potential for major seismic disturbances along the Nazca plate of South America, the Cocos plate, along Central America; and, or the SW region of the U.S. near the Gulf of California, where the Pacific and North American plate are experiencing increased agitation. –The Extinction Protocol
Record melt of Arctic sea ice: “It’s hard even for people like me to believe, to see that climate change is actually doing what our worst fears dictated,” said Jennifer A. Francis, a Rutgers University scientist who studies the effect of sea ice on weather patterns. Scientific forecasts based on computer modeling have long suggested that a time will come when the Arctic will be completely free of ice in the summer, perhaps by the middle of the century. This year’s prodigious melting is lending credibility to more pessimistic analyses that it may come much sooner, perhaps by the end of the decade. “It’s an example of how uncertainty is not our friend when it comes to climate-change risk,” said Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “In this case, the models were almost certainly too conservative in the changes they were projecting, probably because of important missing physics.” –Anchorage Daily News