Scientists have solved the mystery of a 650-foot mega-tsunami that made the Earth vibrate for 9 days
It started with a melting glacier that set off a huge landslide, which triggered a 650-foot high mega-tsunami in Greenland last September. Then came something inexplicable: a mysterious vibration that shook the planet for nine days.
Over the past year, dozens of scientists across the world have been trying to figure out what this signal was.
Now they have an answer, according to a new study in the journal Science, and it provides yet another warning that the Arctic is entering “uncharted waters” as humans push global temperatures ever upwards.
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Some seismologists thought their instruments were broken when they started picking up vibrations through the ground back in September, said Stephen Hicks, a study co-author and a seismologist at University College London.
It wasn’t the rich orchestra of high pitches and rumbles you might expect with an earthquake, but more of a monotonous hum, he told CNN. Earthquake signals tend to last for minutes; this one lasted for nine days.
He was baffled, it was “completely unprecedented,” he said.
Seismologists traced the signal to eastern Greenland, but couldn’t pin down a specific location. So they contacted colleagues in Denmark, who had received reports of a landslide-triggered tsunami in a remote part of the region called Dickson Fjord.
The result was a nearly year-long collaboration between 68 scientists across 15 countries, who combed through seismic, satellite and on-the-ground data, as well as simulations of tsunami waves to solve the puzzle.
Oct 13, 2024
