From left: before (August 2023) and after (September 2023) pictures of the mountain peak and glacier, drawn from the fjord. (Credit: Søren Rysgaard/ Danish Army)
LONDON– Picture this: A tsunami taller than the Tower of Pisa, a fjord changed into nature's bath tub, and the whole Earth vibrating like a tuning fork for over a week. It may seem like the plot of a catastrophe motion picture, however it's the truth of a remarkable occasion that unfolded in Greenland, leaving researchers rushing for descriptions.
On September 16, 2023, a gigantic mountain peak in the beautiful wilderness of East Greenland collapsed into a remote fjord, releasing an incredible chain of occasions. This wasn't simply any landslide– it was an environment change-induced disaster that shook the Earth for an impressive 9 days.
The story starts with a secret. Seismologists around the globe discovered an uncommon signal rippling through the Earth's crust. Unlike the common “rumbles” and “pings” of earthquakes, this vibration sang a boring hum at a single frequency. It continued for days, taking a trip from the Arctic to Antarctica, leaving professionals scratching their heads. They called it a “USO”– an unknown seismic item.
News dripped in of an enormous tsunami in a remote Greenland fjord. As researchers pieced together the puzzle, they revealed a series of occasions more remarkable than anybody might have thought of.
High above Dickson Fjord, a 1.2-kilometer-high mountain peak had actually been gradually destabilizing. As environment modification triggered the glacier at its base to thin, the rocky face lost its assistance. In a disastrous minute, 25 million cubic meters of rock and ice– sufficient to fill 10,000 Olympic-sized pool– came crashing down into the fjord listed below.
The effect, explained in the journal Science, was catastrophic. A wall of water shot 200 meters (an impressive 656 feet!) into the air– almost as high as the Golden Gate Bridge. A tsunami wave as much as 110 meters high (about 361 feet) rose throughout the fjord, slowly settling into a balanced sloshing movement referred to as a seiche.
What makes this occasion genuinely impressive is the length of time this sloshing continued. The seiche preserved an almost continuous frequency of 10.88 mHz (representing a duration of around 92 seconds), slowly reducing in amplitude over 9 days. This implies that the water in the fjord was oscillating backward and forward, finishing one complete cycle about every 92 seconds. This balanced movement moved energy to the surrounding bedrock, creating seismic waves that circumnavigated the world. The consistency and period of this signal were extraordinary, enabling it to be spotted by seismometers worldwide for over a week.
From left: before (August 2023) and after (September 2023) pictures of the mountain peak and glacier, drawn from the fjord. Click to increase the size of. (Credit: Søren Rysgaard, Danish Army)
Dr. Stephen Hicks of UCL Earth Sciences, a co-author of the research study, reveals his preliminary confusion.
