Levon Azizyan, Director of the Center for Hydrometeorology and Monitoring SNCO, wrote on his Facebook page:
“Modern global warming, according to the popular view, is associated with human activity. The primary reason is the carbon footprint generated by industry, transportation, and other sources. However, recently, various approaches have emerged in parallel with the anthropogenic concept. In particular, Russian geophysicists believe that destructive earthquakes contributed to the sharp warming recorded in the Arctic in the late 1970s.
Currently, the connection between climate and seismic activity in the Mont Blanc region (the highest point in the Alps, 4806 m high) has been recorded by the Swiss seismological service and their French colleagues. Only here they think the opposite, that warming is the leading cause of earthquakes. European seismologists analyzed the 2006 Data from a high-precision seismometer installed in the south of the Mont Blanc massif. They detected more than 12,000 weak earthquakes that had not been recorded before.
A sharp increase in activity began in 2015, resulting from anomalous heat that caused the intensive melting of glaciers. As the study showed, the rise in the number of earthquakes was also accompanied by an increase in their magnitude.
According to scientists, meltwater penetrated the depths of mountain rocks and activated previously stable faults. Analysis of weather data revealed that intense heatwaves are associated with an increase in seismic activity, albeit with a noticeable time delay - approximately one year for surface earthquakes and up to two years for deep ones. Earlier, seismologists had found that the number of small tremors in the Mont Blanc region increases in summer and decreases in spring. But the new study allows us to link this seasonal trend to long-term climate change.
The scientists emphasize that this process is similar to other known mechanisms in which water under pressure causes displacements along fractures. Such phenomena are observed, for example, during hydraulic fracturing (fracking), geothermal projects, and water pumping underground. The current seismic activity in the Alps does not pose a threat to the Mont Blanc Tunnel and surrounding settlements. However, similar processes may also occur in other mountain regions where glaciers are actively melting, including in the Himalayas.
