The Large Earthquakes and Deformation Waves as Possible Triggers of Climate Warming in the Arctic and Glacier Destruction in the Antarctic

Abstract

According to the modern climate paradigm, anomalous phenomena occurring in the polar regions of the Earth, such as rapid warming in the Arctic and intensive destruction of glaciers in the Antarctic, are a serious danger and challenge for civilization since they can potentially lead to global climate warming by several degrees and a rise in the level of the World Ocean by several tens of centimeters as soon as the 21st century. It is presumed that the main cause of these processes, which have strongly accelerated since the second half of the 1970s, was the anthropogenic factor of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, leading to the greenhouse effect. This statement, taken for granted in most developed countries, has led to several international agreements to limit carbon emissions and ideas about the need for a rapid transition to a low-carbon green economy. As for the influence of natural factors on the development of the mentioned dangerous processes, no one denies such a possibility since the facts of climatic changes in preindustrial eras are well known in the geological history of the Earth. However, the geological time scales are so large that most climatologists implicitly proceed from the assumption that short-term climate changes observed over the past and present centuries with a characteristic time of tens of years are mainly determined by rapidly changing atmospheric and oceanic processes. However, one should bear in mind the influence of rapid geophysical processes, such as cycles of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, which are comparable in time scales with modern climate changes. If an analysis is based on the large megathrust earthquakes with a magnitude greater than 8 and the large-scale deformation waves caused by them in the lithosphere, then, considering physically based trigger mechanisms, it is possible to construct a geodynamic scheme that explains the observed climatic changes in the Arctic and the glacier destruction processes in the Antarctic. This article describes this new geodynamic concept.