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Western US Drought Has Made Earth's Crust Rise
Loss of both groundwater and water stored in surface reservoirs in the drought-striken western U.S. isn't just expensive and contentious: it's evidently making the earth's crust rise in the West. Scripps researchers say that the average rise across a wide stretch of the West Coast is approximately one sixth of an inch.
Scientists came to this conclusion by studying data collected from hundreds of GPS sensors across the Western U.S., installed primarily to detect small changes in the ground due to earthquakes. But the GPS data can also be used to show very small changes in elevation. The study specifically examined GPS stations on bedrock or very thin soil because it provides the most accurate measurement of groundwater loss, said Duncan Agnew, professor of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Areas with thick soil, such as farms, can see the ground sinking as the soil dries out. But Agnew said the bedrock underneath that soil is actually rising.
The highest uplift of the Earth occurred in California's mountains because there is so much water below them, Agnew said. The uplift was less in Nevada and the Great Basin.
Only one sixth of an inch? Are you sure?
My Galileo positioning system tells me that the earth's crust rose by more than 113km.
So it was like a frozen pizza or something?
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
Science and inch are not compatible.
What's an inch? Or a sixth of an inch? Can't compute.
It was good enough for the British scientists of the 19th century, but young people these days are made of wimpier stuff :P
Large portions of North America and Europe are currently rising because the weight of glaciers that once pushed them down has been removed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
You mean this: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/ear... ?
Timely,
Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.
It's probably Dick Cheney's fault.
He also traveled back in time and caused the Dust Bowl.
Excellent. This takes care of the problem of rising sea levels.
Earthquakes and volcanoes erupting are a constant in the Earth's progression. Our impact on the enviornment is what is actually changing the game. Are we impacting (at least temporarily) the weather that we rely upon? Are we intelligent enough to create solutions to the problems we have/are creating?
The real question is, can we survive ourselves?
Making the earth's crust rise should not directly affect the strike-slip San Andreas fault at all. However, it has been anecdotally noted on syzygyjob.com forums that thrust quakes seem to be on the rise, along with hypothesizing that the rising crust might release friction allowing exactly that.
For my own part, I've noticed a large increase of small quakes surrounding the great elliptical basin, the southwest of which coincides with the rising sierra nevada; and occasional time-coincident radial forays into the same basin.
So I half wonder if the rising isn't part of a larger-scale process.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
%22feed%22%3A%227day_m25%22%2C%22search%22%3Anull%2C%22sort%22%3A%22newest%22%2C%22basemap%22%3A%22grayscale%22%2C%22autoUpdate%22%3Atrue%2C%22restrictListToMap%22%3Atrue%2C%22timeZone%22%3A%22local%22%2C%22mapposition%22%3A[[30.221101852485987%2C-131.30859375]%2C[43.229195113965005%2C-106.69921875]]%2C%22overlays%22%3A{%22plates%22%3Atrue}%2C%22viewModes%22%3A{%22map%22%3Atrue%2C%22list%22%3Afalse%2C%22settings%22%3Atrue%2C%22help%22%3Afalse
You really shouldn't try to type during an earthquake.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Yes, the two findings (CA rising and 6.0 equake) are closely related. As has become common knowledge, the San Andreas fault is about to slip in a majorily massive way, and all of the USA east of it is going to sink into the Atlantic Ocean.
Oh. And what RealHocusLocus said about you typing during an equake...
Will
I'd like to know how this can be determined when GPS accuracy appears to be good only to about 3 meters.
http://www.gps.gov/systems/gps...
Just another day in Paradise
So I half wonder if the rising isn't part of a larger-scale process.
IANAG, but I think the Rocky Mountains are clear evidence of this larger-scale process.
Does anyone remember when there were plans to inject water into faults to make them slip before the strains reached epic proportions? Fracking and drought are now running those sorts of experiments for us.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
The value measured in about 1 CM of rise over the Western US. In Places which were covered by continental glaciers as recently as 12,00 YA, the change in elevation can be measured in feet and it is uneven. The evidence is that drainages have been reversed in places like Canada in historical time as the crust rebounds. Ice and water are relatively dense, so that the weight of a mile of ice can sufficiently weigh down the crust which floats on the plastically deformable mantle. Although rock seems rigid to you and I, its so-called rheology, over large distances and times makes it behave like putty. Putty and clay can be used in scale models of geology to study effects like faulting and folding because of this. Years ago an important contender for explaining mountain building was gravity tectonics, before active plate motions were found to be the main cause.