Climate change could trigger gigantic deadly tsunamis from Antarctica | Hacker News Reader

Climate change could trigger gigantic deadly tsunamis from Antarctica

livescience.com

17 pointsBrajeshwar8 comments

"could trigger gigantic deadly" is screaming "I'm desperate for attention, read me!" Every time pop-journalism uses these screaming titles from yellow press, the public creates one more association between climate change and yellow press.

Good point, it's factual though.

And we don't even need to go back millions of years : from a somewhat different cause, merely ~10kya, at the beginning of the current interglacial, glacier melt has caused a tsunami that scraped off the northern half of what would be today the Netherlands, and opened the English Channel.

Much smaller, the Alpine village of Saint-Gervais has been razed merely a century ago by a glacial dam bursting, killing nearly all 200 inhabitants. Since then, regular holes had been drilled, hoping to evacuate water... but no water came out, because researchers realized in 2009 that the holes have been drilled too high ! 10 times more people live in Saint-Gervais today.

So we better keep a close eye on big glaciers, and especially Antarctica and Greenland...

Certainly but we should at the same time avoid ruling out some pretty bad side-effects from changing climate.

Case in point: Mt Rainier. The upper mountain has a sizable ice mass that (among other things) buttresses the various cleavers and rock formations like Gibralter Rock. It's not unreasonable to suppose that these will eventually slide off as the mountain loses ice mass, triggering lahars. In the past such lahars reached the Puget Sound in Tacoma. [0]

[0] https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/mount-rainier/lahars-and-debr...

At this point my response to anything other than solid data is “I’ll believe it when I see it.” These articles and the complex that produces then have done a disservice to the climate change discussion.

Megatsunami are well-documented in the geological record. [0] One of the more interesting ones occurred in Hawaii when the flank of the East Molokai Volcano collapsed, creating what are believed to have been 600 meter high waves in the vicinity. [1]

It's common to discount such disasters because they generally happen at intervals 10 to 1000x greater than human lifespans, and the most catastrophic events occurred in prehistoric times. It's likely we don't know even half the story as the recognition of these events is relatively recent.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatsunami

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Molokai_Volcano

Edit: added footnote

Indeed. Every "could" headline is also a "could not" headline.

Monkeys could fly out of my ass. Who knows.

It falls firmly into the realm of Michael Crichton's HN-famous "Why speculate?" talk.

On one hand yes, but on the other hand the yellow press does this with everything.

Ad based journalism is fundamentally broken and we shouldn’t be listening to it for anything really.

Still waiting for the sea level rise As Gore promised us to ruin Obama's beachfront home. I won't hold my breath.

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