Abstract
Climate change is increasingly predisposing polar regions to large landslides. Tsunamigenic landslides have occurred recently in Greenland, but none have been reported from the eastern fjords. In September 2023, we detected the start of a 9-day-long global 10.88 mHz (92 s) monochromatic very long-period (VLP) seismic signal, originating from East Greenland. We demonstrate how this event started with a 25×106 m3 71 glacial thinning-induced rock-ice avalanche plunging into Dickson Fjord, triggering a 200 m high tsunami. Simulations show the tsunami stabilized into a 7 m-high long-duration seiche with a near-identical frequency (11.45 mHz) and slow amplitude decay as the seismic signal. An oscillating, fjord-transverse single-force with a maximum amplitude of 5×10 75 11 N reproduces the seismic amplitudes and their radiation pattern relative to the fjord, demonstrating how a seiche directly caused the 9-day-long seismic signal. Our findings highlight how climate change is causing cascading, hazardous feedbacks between the cryosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1196–1205 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Science |
| Volume | 385 |
| Issue number | 6714 |
| Early online date | 12 Sept 2024 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 13 Sept 2024 |
Bibliographical note
AcknowledgmentsWe thank the Editor, three anonymous reviewers, and Liam Toney for their time taken to provide excellent and constructive comments on the first version of the manuscript. We also thank Brian Shiro and Janet Carter for spending substantial time to improve the presentation of the manuscript. The Joint Arctic Command, the Sirius dog sled patrol of the Kingdom of Denmark, and Northeast Greenland company Nanok are thanked for their cooperation and for making photos from after the event available to us. All initial and advanced scientific discussions were held virtually via the MatterMost platform. We are grateful to AskTom SCS for hosting this service. We are grateful to Walter Zürn for many fruitful and inspiring face-to-face discussions. We thank The Danish Agency for Data Supply and Infrastructure (SDFI) for providing GNET GNSS data. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.
Data Availability Statement
We provide a publicly available Zenodo repository (61) that comprises materials, data, and code to allow the main findings and figures of this paper to be reproduced. Data from the Dickson Fjord sea level gauge/CTD and meteorological station are also publicly available (62). All other seismic and remote sensing data come from publicly available repositories (see Materials & Methods (29) for each FDSN network code and corresponding citation). The Global Seismographic Network (GSN) is a cooperative scientific facility operated jointly by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The NSF component is part of the NSF SAGE Facility, operated by EarthScope Consortium under Cooperative Agreement EAR-1724509.
Access to Document
- Svenneig_etal_S_A_Rocklide_Generated_AAM
This manuscript has been made open access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence under the terms of the University of Aberdeen Research Publications Policy. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/