But its appeal and practicality remain contentious. And the new way of doing things comes with profound implications for the farming community.
Money is tight, and the future is scarily uncertain.
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Researchers have identified a possible link between climate change and the frequency of earthquakes — and the quakes may also start a vicious circle of accelerating climate change.
Updated Feb. 16, 2024 at 11:15 a.m.*
PARIS — Between 1900 and 1950, the Earth recorded an average of 3.4 earthquakes per year with a magnitude greater than 6.5. That figured doubled to 6.7 a year until the early 1970s, and was almost five times that in the 2000s.
For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.
Their intensity would also have increased with more than 25 major earthquakes per year, double the previous periods. This is according to the EM-DAT emergency events database, which compiled the occurrence and effects of 22,000 mass disasters worldwide in the 20th century.
Can we conclude that there is a causal relationship with the rise of human activities, as some experts suggest? The idea was first suggested in 2011 by an Australian research team led by geology professor Giampiero Iaffaldano. At the time, it reported that it had found that the intensification of the monsoon in India had accelerated the movement of the Indian tectonic plate by 20% over the past 10 million years.
Iaffaldano wrote in Earth and Planetary Science Letters that the closing and opening of ocean basins, or the emergence of high mountains like the Andes or Tibet, are geological processes that affect climate. "We have shown for the first time that the reverse is true, that the evolution of the climate can affect in return the movement of tectonic plates."
Since this study, no team has been able to demonstrate a convincing link between short-term climate change and the increase in the number of earthquakes in the world. However, scientists are wondering about the impact of glacial melt on the Earth's mantle.
"The ice is holding back large parts of the Earth's crust locally," says geophysicist Andrea Hampel. Together with her colleagues from the Ruhr University in Bochum in Germany, she has discovered that the weight of the large glaciers on the earth slows down the movement of the continental plates.
As proof: she demonstrated with the help of computer simulations that the seismic rebound that Scandinavia experienced temporarily 9,000 years ago coincided with the rapid melting of the Fino-Scandinavian ice cap that covered the entire region at the time.
According to this simulation, the vertical pressure exerted by the ice could have prevented the spontaneous sliding of continental plates along geological faults. But like a spring, the mechanical tensions due to the movements of the earth's crust continued to accumulate and were released when the ice melted, causing more frequent and intense earthquakes in Northern Europe.
Can the same phenomenon occur more widely today with global warming? Some researchers say so and speculate that this mechanism has already begun to take place, notably in Alaska. It is there that we find the largest glaciers in the world extending over several hundred square kilometers and hundreds of meters thick.
The degradation of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will lead to an increase in the frequency of earthquakes.
In 200 years, they have lost more than 5,000 km2 of ice. "The earth rises consecutively, and this uplift occurs in two stages," explains Chris Rollins, a researcher at the University of Fairbanks in Alaska. "First, it's instantaneous due to the elastic effect of the loss of ice mass, and then it's slower as the mantle re-positions."
Southern Alaska is a red zone in the Earth's crust where many earthquakes occur due to the overlap of the North American continental plate and the Pacific plate. "As the ice melts, the faults sometimes reach their stress limit," he explains. That's what probably happened in 1958 when a magnitude 7.8 earthquake triggered a phenomenal landslide.
"Based on our models, we predict that the degradation of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets during global warming will lead to an increase in the frequency of earthquakes in these regions," says Andrea Hampel, who took over this work.
Consequences of a natural disaster that hit Jacksonville, Florida, USA, in December 2019.
That's not all. According to several vulcanologists, first and foremost Bill McGuire, who teaches at the University College of London, the melting of the Greenland ice cap could release the pressure that kept the volcanic vents closed and cause gigantic landslides on the seabed off the coast of this territory attached to Denmark.
"These climate change events have occurred several times in Earth's history and produce devastating mega-tsunamis," he recently warned in the magazine New Scientist.
More landslides are likely as mountain glaciers continue to shrink and alpine permafrost thaws.
Scientists have found geological traces. 100,000 years ago, the collapse of the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa would have caused a cataclysmic tidal wave of over 300 meters high. More recently, on Oct. 17, 2015, the melting of Alaska's Tyndall Glacier precipitated 180 million tons of rock into the waters of the deserted Taan Fjord, raising a giant 193-meter wave that flooded 20 square kilometers of land before subsiding offshore.
"More such landslides are likely to occur as mountain glaciers continue to shrink and alpine permafrost thaws," writes American geologist Bretwood Higman, lead author of a well-researched study of the cataclysm published in Nature.
Consequences of a natural disaster, USA, February 2020.
A vicious cycle could be hidden in these upheavals: these earthquakes would accelerate global warming, says a team of Russian scientists. To come to this conclusion, the researchers observed two periods of sudden increases in temperature in the Arctic, in the 1930s and 1980s.
"These two periods were preceded by major earthquakes in a region 2,000 km away," explain the authors. But it took time for the tectonic waves to reach the ice shelf from the Aleutian Islands in southwest Alaska: between 15 and 20 years, at a rate of about 100 km per year.
If this hypothesis is confirmed, it would mean that large quantities of methane, the most powerful greenhouse gas, will be released by the tremors that have occurred since then.
This article was updated on Feb. 16, 2024 at 11:15 a.m. to add enriched multimedia content, audio file and the author link.
Researchers have identified a possible link between climate change and the frequency of earthquakes — and the quakes may also start a vicious circle of accelerating climate change.
Updated Feb. 16, 2024 at 11:15 a.m.*
PARIS — Between 1900 and 1950, the Earth recorded an average of 3.4 earthquakes per year with a magnitude greater than 6.5. That figured doubled to 6.7 a year until the early 1970s, and was almost five times that in the 2000s.
For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.
Their intensity would also have increased with more than 25 major earthquakes per year, double the previous periods. This is according to the EM-DAT emergency events database, which compiled the occurrence and effects of 22,000 mass disasters worldwide in the 20th century.
Can we conclude that there is a causal relationship with the rise of human activities, as some experts suggest? The idea was first suggested in 2011 by an Australian research team led by geology professor Giampiero Iaffaldano. At the time, it reported that it had found that the intensification of the monsoon in India had accelerated the movement of the Indian tectonic plate by 20% over the past 10 million years.
Iaffaldano wrote in Earth and Planetary Science Letters that the closing and opening of ocean basins, or the emergence of high mountains like the Andes or Tibet, are geological processes that affect climate. "We have shown for the first time that the reverse is true, that the evolution of the climate can affect in return the movement of tectonic plates."
Since this study, no team has been able to demonstrate a convincing link between short-term climate change and the increase in the number of earthquakes in the world. However, scientists are wondering about the impact of glacial melt on the Earth's mantle.
"The ice is holding back large parts of the Earth's crust locally," says geophysicist Andrea Hampel. Together with her colleagues from the Ruhr University in Bochum in Germany, she has discovered that the weight of the large glaciers on the earth slows down the movement of the continental plates.
As proof: she demonstrated with the help of computer simulations that the seismic rebound that Scandinavia experienced temporarily 9,000 years ago coincided with the rapid melting of the Fino-Scandinavian ice cap that covered the entire region at the time.
According to this simulation, the vertical pressure exerted by the ice could have prevented the spontaneous sliding of continental plates along geological faults. But like a spring, the mechanical tensions due to the movements of the earth's crust continued to accumulate and were released when the ice melted, causing more frequent and intense earthquakes in Northern Europe.
Can the same phenomenon occur more widely today with global warming? Some researchers say so and speculate that this mechanism has already begun to take place, notably in Alaska. It is there that we find the largest glaciers in the world extending over several hundred square kilometers and hundreds of meters thick.
The degradation of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will lead to an increase in the frequency of earthquakes.
In 200 years, they have lost more than 5,000 km2 of ice. "The earth rises consecutively, and this uplift occurs in two stages," explains Chris Rollins, a researcher at the University of Fairbanks in Alaska. "First, it's instantaneous due to the elastic effect of the loss of ice mass, and then it's slower as the mantle re-positions."
Southern Alaska is a red zone in the Earth's crust where many earthquakes occur due to the overlap of the North American continental plate and the Pacific plate. "As the ice melts, the faults sometimes reach their stress limit," he explains. That's what probably happened in 1958 when a magnitude 7.8 earthquake triggered a phenomenal landslide.
"Based on our models, we predict that the degradation of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets during global warming will lead to an increase in the frequency of earthquakes in these regions," says Andrea Hampel, who took over this work.
Consequences of a natural disaster that hit Jacksonville, Florida, USA, in December 2019.
That's not all. According to several vulcanologists, first and foremost Bill McGuire, who teaches at the University College of London, the melting of the Greenland ice cap could release the pressure that kept the volcanic vents closed and cause gigantic landslides on the seabed off the coast of this territory attached to Denmark.
"These climate change events have occurred several times in Earth's history and produce devastating mega-tsunamis," he recently warned in the magazine New Scientist.
More landslides are likely as mountain glaciers continue to shrink and alpine permafrost thaws.
Scientists have found geological traces. 100,000 years ago, the collapse of the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa would have caused a cataclysmic tidal wave of over 300 meters high. More recently, on Oct. 17, 2015, the melting of Alaska's Tyndall Glacier precipitated 180 million tons of rock into the waters of the deserted Taan Fjord, raising a giant 193-meter wave that flooded 20 square kilometers of land before subsiding offshore.
"More such landslides are likely to occur as mountain glaciers continue to shrink and alpine permafrost thaws," writes American geologist Bretwood Higman, lead author of a well-researched study of the cataclysm published in Nature.
Consequences of a natural disaster, USA, February 2020.
A vicious cycle could be hidden in these upheavals: these earthquakes would accelerate global warming, says a team of Russian scientists. To come to this conclusion, the researchers observed two periods of sudden increases in temperature in the Arctic, in the 1930s and 1980s.
"These two periods were preceded by major earthquakes in a region 2,000 km away," explain the authors. But it took time for the tectonic waves to reach the ice shelf from the Aleutian Islands in southwest Alaska: between 15 and 20 years, at a rate of about 100 km per year.
If this hypothesis is confirmed, it would mean that large quantities of methane, the most powerful greenhouse gas, will be released by the tremors that have occurred since then.
This article was updated on Feb. 16, 2024 at 11:15 a.m. to add enriched multimedia content, audio file and the author link.
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The UK government wants its farming sector to transition to a more sustainable model. But farmers fear the complex post-Brexit agricultural policy and lack of EU subsidies are threatening their livelihood.
The UK’s farming landscape has changed dramatically since Brexit. Agricultural policy has been adjusted, and EU subsidies, which funded UK farming for decades, are no more.
Before the split, those subsidies helped British farmers to the tune of nearly £3 billion a year, which for some, made up 90% of their annual income. That system is now being phased out, in a move which the UK government claims will be more environmentally sustainable.
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Central to this new approach are “environmental land management schemes”, designed to encourage farmers to produce what are known as “public goods” – things like soil health and wildlife habitats – with financial payment levels dependent on which of these goods are attained. Defra aims for 70% farmer participation by 2028, with 11,000 farmers in England already enrolled.
But its appeal and practicality remain contentious. And the new way of doing things comes with profound implications for the farming community.
Money is tight, and the future is scarily uncertain.
Our work investigates the constraints and challenges facing farmers in the UK and abroad. Recently, we explored the constraints encountered by farmers since Brexit, specifically focusing on upland farms in England. We found that the focus on environmental sustainability, though commendable, overlooks critical economic and social dimensions.
The transition threatens to marginalise traditionally minded farmers, lose cultural heritage and weaken the rural community’s social fabric. And it’s a transition which doesn’t just affect the farmers themselves. The farming and food industries are valued at over £120 billion to the British economy.
Speaking to upland farmers (who work in hilly and mountainous regions) across four English counties (Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cumbria and Devon), we discovered that many are extremely concerned about the future of the farms they look after. Farms that for some, have been in their families for generations.
I don’t even bother with these newer schemes because I don’t understand it.
One 70-year-old farmer from Lancashire commented bluntly about the future of his 250-acre beef and sheep farm: “We’re not going to be viable.”
He added: “I might as well stop farming and diversify into holiday lets.”
Another farmer, aged 50, who keeps Herdwick sheep in the Lake District, highlighted the critical role of EU subsidies, noting that their planned removal by 2027 would severely limit their farm’s finances and their ability to pursue environmental initiatives.
She said: “With that basic payment taken out of the business, it’s really difficult. We can make about £10,000 profit, but our basic payment is more than that. So that’s going to take us into a situation where we’re not making any money.”
There were also concerns expressed about how difficult it is to understand the new farming policy in the UK. Four in ten UK farmers are aged over 65, and information laid out in the 150-page “Sustainable Farming Incentive” document can be overwhelming. Many traditional farmers do not use mobile phones, and are unfamiliar with the online world.
Farmers bring their tractors into London duringa protest organised by Save Briish Farming and Farmers for Fairness.
Cal Ford/ZUMA
One farmer told us: “In my porch I’ve got like a thousand leaflets stacked up that [Defra] just sent me to take out to people because a lot of the farmers that I’m working with are not online. They haven’t heard about a lot of this stuff.”
She added: “I went to a farm last week, which is only accessible with a 4x4. Nobody’s been there to talk to them about schemes and stuff ever.”
Another said farmer, aged 72, said: “All the form filling is too damn difficult. I don’t even bother with these newer schemes because I don’t understand it.”
And while new schemes may be complex, many of the farmers we spoke to were very clear about the risks to the future of British farming. Overall, they seemed worried that farms, skills and knowledge that have been passed down through generations would be lost during this transition to more sustainable farming.
One said: “If farming isn’t going to be supported in the way it has been in the past, we’re going to lose an awful lot of farmers who have been on farms [for generations]. Their skill set and instinct will be gone, and it’ll be enveloped by agribusiness. That’s perhaps what [the government] want.”
The future seems pretty bleak.
Another explained: “If we lose the older generation that’s a massive loss."
"What used to happen with tenancies is people would work together, like me and my son. And then one would gradually step back and the other would gradually take over. It’s a gradual process.”
Overall, we found that for the more traditional farmers we spoke to, the future seemed pretty bleak. There was also a strong sense that while the farms they operated may not be hugely profitable, or provide the strongest environmental benefits, the work they do still had social and cultural value – which risks being lost forever.
And as England navigates the complexities of post-Brexit agricultural policy, the balance between environmental goals and the preservation of traditional farming practices remains precarious. Many of the farmers we met felt that they were being pushed away from their traditional role as producers.
As one farmer put it: “If you’re taking productive land out of production for your tree planting or diversification of whatever kind, then where’s our food coming from?”
*Peter Gittins, Lecturer in Management, University of Leeds and Deema Refai, Associate Professor in Enterprise and Entrepreneurship, University of Leeds
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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