Global warming may not only be causing more destructive hurricanes, it could also be shaking the

ground beneath our feet. 1 While a warmer world will not necessarily mean more hurricanes, it will see a
rise in the frequency of the most powerful, and therefore more destructive, variety.

For many, the bottomline is the sea surface temperature, which is a major driver of hurricane activity
and storm intensification.

Tornadoes, typhoons, hurricanes and mid-latitude storms – along with

heatwaves and floods – are widely regarded as climate change’s shock troops;
forecast to accelerate the destruction, loss of life and financial pain as planet
Earth continues to heat up. It would be wrong to imagine, however, that climate
change and the extreme events it drives are all about higher temperatures and a
bit more wind and rain.

including earthquakes

In a similar vein, it seems that the huge volume of rain dumped by tropical
cyclones, leading to severe flooding, may also be linked to earthquakes. The
University of Miami’s Shimon Wdowinski has noticed that in some parts of the
tropics – Taiwan included – large earthquakes have a tendency to follow
exceptionally wet hurricanes or typhoons, most notably the devastating quake
that took up to 220,000 lives in Haiti in 2010. It is possible that floodwaters are
lubricating fault planes, but Wdowinski has another explanation. He thinks that
the erosion of landslides caused by the torrential rains acts to reduce the weight
on any fault below, allowing it to move more easily.

And it isn’t only earthquake faults that today’s storms and torrential rains are
capable of shaking up. Volcanoes seem to be susceptible too. On the Caribbean
island of Montserrat, heavy rains have been implicated in triggering eruptions of
the active lava dome that dominates the Soufrière Hills volcano. Stranger
still, Alaska’s Pavlof volcano appears to respond not to wind or rain, but to tiny
seasonal changes in sea level. The volcano seems to prefer to erupt in the late
autumn and winter, when weather patterns are such that water levels adjacent to
this coastal volcano climb by a few tens of centimetres. This is enough to bend the
crust beneath the volcano, allowing magma to be squeezed out, according to
geophysicist Steve McNutt of the University of South Florida, “like toothpaste out
of a tube”.

1
Bill McGuire (2016), How climate change triggers earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes, The Guardian,
October 16, 2016, available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/16/climate-change-triggers-
earthquakes-tsunamis-volcanoes (May 24, 2020)
This relationship is marvellously illustrated by a piece of research published in
the journal Nature in 2009 by Chi-Ching Liu of the Institute of Earth Sciences at
Taipei’s Academia Sinica. In the paper, Liu and his colleagues provided
convincing evidence for a link between typhoons barrelling across Taiwan and
the timing of small earthquakes beneath the island. Their take on the connection
is that the reduced atmospheric pressure that characterises these powerful Pacific
equivalents of hurricanes is sufficient to allow earthquake faults deep within the
crust to move more easily and release accumulated strain. This may sound far
fetched, but an earthquake fault that is primed and ready to go is like a coiled
spring, and as geophysicist John McCloskey of the University of Ulster is fond of
pointing out, all that is needed to set it off is – quite literally – “the pressure of a
handshake”.2

Perhaps even more astonishingly, Liu and his team proposed that storms might
act as safety valves, repeatedly short-circuiting the buildup of dangerous levels of
strain that otherwise could eventually instigate large, destructive earthquakes.
This might explain, the researchers say, why the contact between the Eurasian
and Philippine Sea tectonic plates, in the vicinity of Taiwan, has far less in the
way of major quakes than further north where the plate boundary swings past
Japan.

The first reports1,2 on a slow earthquake were for an event in the Izu peninsula, Japan,
on an intraplate, seismically active fault. Since then, many slow earthquakes have
been detected3,4,5,6,7,8. It has been suggested9 that the slow events may trigger ordinary
earthquakes (in a context supported by numerical modelling 10), but their broader
significance in terms of earthquake occurrence remains unclear. Triggering of
earthquakes has received much attention: strain diffusion from large regional
earthquakes has been shown to influence large earthquake activity 11,12, and
earthquakes may be triggered during the passage of teleseismic waves 13, a
phenomenon now recognized as being common 14,15,16,17. Here we show that, in
eastern Taiwan, slow earthquakes can be triggered by typhoons. We model the largest
of these earthquakes as repeated episodes of slow slip on a reverse fault just under
land and dipping to the west; the characteristics of all events are sufficiently similar
that they can be modelled with minor variations of the model parameters. Lower
pressure results in a very small unclamping of the fault that must be close to the
failure condition for the typhoon to act as a trigger. This area experiences very high
compressional deformation but has a paucity of large earthquakes; repeating slow

2
ChiChing Liu, Alan T. Linde and I. Selwyn Sacks (2009) Slow earthquakes triggered by typhoons, Nature,
June 11, 2009 available at https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08042 (May 24, 2020)
events may be segmenting the stressed area and thus inhibiting large earthquakes,
which require a long, continuous seismic rupture.
Climatic changes in temperature can directly or indirectly affect the water table, which affects tectonic
plates. We are seeing glaciers in Greenland and the Antarctic shrink in volume, which contributes to sea
level rise. When a giant slab of glacier breaks off it can produce an earthquake because of the low-
pressure zone created as water rushes in to the new opening. This moves the glacier itself, and the
lessened load on the bedrock causes it to flex releasing a seismic wave. 3

and stronger hurricanes and storms

Global warming is expected to have far-reaching, long-lasting and, in many cases, devastating
consequences for planet Earth.4

Additionally, scientists are confident that hurricanes will become more intense due to
climate change." This is because hurricanes get their energy from the temperature
difference between the warm tropical ocean and the cold upper atmosphere. Global
warming increases that temperature difference. 

"Since the most damage by far comes from the most intense hurricanes — such as
typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013 — this means that hurricanes could become
overall more destructive," said Sobel, a Columbia University professor in the
departments of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and Applied Physics and Applied
Mathematics. (Hurricanes are called typhoons in the western North Pacific, and they're
called cyclones in the South Pacific and Indian oceans.)

With increasing global surface temperatures the possibility of more droughts and increased intensity of
storms will likely occur. As more water vapour is evaporated into the atmosphere it becomes fuel for
more powerful storms to develop. More heat in the atmosphere and warmer ocean surface
temperatures can lead to increased wind speeds in tropical storms. Rising sea levels expose higher
locations not usually subjected to the power of the sea and to the erosive forces of waves and currents."
5

and tsunamis,

3
T. Murray, M. Nettles, N. Selmes, L.M. Cathles, J.C. Burton, T.D. James, S. Edwards, I. Martin, T. O'Farrell, R. Aspey,
I. Rutt, T. Bauge, 2015, "Reverse glacier motion during iceberg calving and the cause of glacial earthquakes,"
Science. 17 Jul 2015: 305-308.
4
Alina Bradford (2017) Effects of Global Warming, LiveScience, August 12, 2017 available at
https://www.livescience.com/37057-global-warming-effects.html (May 24, 2020)
5
d from https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-can-climate-change-affect-natural-disasters-1?
qtnews_science_products=0#qt-news_science_products
 6
Tsunamis: Yet just weeks before this latest disaster, a group of scientists predicted that
tsunami impacts will indeed worsen due to sea-level rises related to climate change. 
"Our research shows that sea-level rise can significantly increase the tsunami hazard, which
means that smaller tsunamis in the future can have the same adverse impacts as big
tsunamis would today," Robert Weiss, associate professor in the Department of Geosciences
at Virginia Tech told DW.

A modest 0.5-meter (1.5-foot) rise in sea-level will double the tsunami hazard in Macau 7,"
the study was also co-authored by Adam Switzer, associate professor at Singapore's Earth
Observatory.

volcanic eruptions,

6
Stuart Braun (2018) Climate-induced sea level rise to worsen tsunami impacts, Deutsche Welle, March 10, 2018,
available at https://www.dw.com/en/climate-induced-sea-level-rise-to-worsen-tsunami-impacts/a-45730449 (May
24, 2020)
7
Li, Lin & Switzer, Adam & Wang, Yu & Chan, Chung-Han & Qiu, Qiang & Weiss, Robert. (2018). A modest 0.5-m
rise in sea level will double the tsunami hazard in Macau. Science Advances. August 2018 available at
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327045632_A_modest_05-
m_rise_in_sea_level_will_double_the_tsunami_hazard_in_Macau (May 24, 2020)