Giant underwater landslides in Antarctica caused by past climate change: Study

According to a study written by the researchers published in Nature Communications earlier this month, these weak layers made the area susceptible to failure when earthquakes or other seismic activity happens.

The researchers say that those weak layers were formed at a time when temperatures in Antarctica were up to 3 degrees Celsius warmer than they are today and when sea levels were higher and ice sheets much smaller than at present.

If all of that sounds familiar, it is because our planet is going through many such changes right now, including rising sea levels, warmer waters and shrinking ice sheets. This means that there is a potential for such giant underwater landslides to happen again as climate change continues its march unabated.

“We need to better understand the extent of the weak layers that sit beneath the submarine landslides in Antarctica that make this area unstable. We also need to better understand exactly how climate is influencing the triggering of these submarine landslides. This will give us a better understanding of the future risks posed by these hazardous events,” Jenny Gales told indianexpress.com.

According to Gales, underwater landslides are a major hazard with the potential to trigger tsunamis that can cause huge losses of life. Such landslides can also destroy infrastructure including undersea cables. “The submarine landslides are dated to around 400,000 years ago, 1.72 million years ago and 12.14 million years ago and any tsunami associated with these submarine landslides would have happened directly after the submarine landslide events,” said Gales, referring to the evidence of landslides detected in 2017 by an international team of scientists during the Italian ODYSSEA expedition.

The scientists revisited the area in 2018 as part of an expedition where they collected sediment cores from as deep as hundreds of metres under the seafloor. They analysed these samples and understood what the climate would have been like in the region millions of years ago, and how it created the weak layers under the seabed.