Big storm can create ‘stormquake’: study
‘Protect rain-forest’
WASHINGTON, Oct 19, (Agencies): Scientists have discovered a mash-up of two feared disasters – hurricanes and earthquakes – and they’re calling them “stormquakes.”
The shaking of the sea floor during hurricanes and nor’easters can rumble like a magnitude 3.5 earthquake and can last for days, according to a study in this week’s journal Geophysical Research Letters. The quakes are fairly common, but they weren’t noticed before because they were considered seismic background noise.
A stormquake is more an oddity than something that can hurt you, because no one is standing on the sea floor during a hurricane, said Wenyuan Fan, a Florida State University seismologist who was the study’s lead author.
The combination of two frightening natural phenomena might bring to mind “Sharknado”, but stormquakes are real and not dangerous.
“This is the last thing you need to worry about,” Fan told The Associated Press.
Storms trigger giant waves in the sea, which cause another type of wave. These secondary waves then interact with the seafloor – but only in certain places – and that causes the shaking, Fan said. It only happens in places where there’s a large continental shelf and shallow flat land.
Fan’s team found 14,077 stormquakes between September 2006 and February 2015 in the Gulf of Mexico and off Florida, New England, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Labrador and British Columbia. A special type of military sensor is needed to spot them, Fan said.
Hurricane Ike in 2008 and Hurricane Irene in 2011 set off lots of stormquakes, the study said.
The shaking is a type that creates a wave that seismologists don’t normally look for when monitoring earthquakes, so that’s why these have gone unnoticed until now, Fan said.
Ocean-generated seismic waves show up on US Geological Survey instruments, “but in our mission of looking for earthquakes these waves are considered background noise,” USGS seismologist Paul Earle said.
The study is interesting, because it looks at a frequency of waves that scientists hadn’t examined much, said Stanford University geophysics professor Lucia Gualtieri.
A new green fund being set up by Indonesia should prioritise protecting its rain-forests and creating a carbon trading programme to help the country meet its goals to curb climate change, environmentalists and officials said.
Indonesia’s environment ministry last week launched an agency to manage funds to repair environmental damage and educate communities to prevent further harm.
The agency is due to begin operating at the start of 2020 with initial finance of about 2 trillion rupiah ($141 million) from land restoration payments and fines the state collects from environmental crime cases, as well as money from foreign donors.
The agency could potentially raise up to 800 trillion rupiah ($56.5 billion) for environmental projects, Indonesia’s finance minister told reporters.
Vegard Kaale, Norway’s ambassador to Indonesia, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation the new fund could help Indonesia meet its national commitments under the 2015 Paris Agreement to tackle climate change, “if used efficiently”.
“The income from reduced deforestation could benefit provinces and communities that are both producing emissions reductions and preserving biodiversity and are most at risk of the impacts of climate change,” he said, referring to compensation the Southeast Asian nation may receive for keeping its forests standing.
Home to the world’s third-largest tropical forests, Indonesia is also the biggest producer of palm oil, which many green groups blame for the clearing of forests for plantations.
About a decade ago, Norway signed a $1-billion deal with Indonesia to protect its forests and this year made the first payment for cutting emissions after deforestation rates fell.
Kaale said Indonesia could potentially increase its climate financing from many sources, including the private sector, international donors and multilateral organisations.