By Jo Nova

Every scientific curiosity becomes a climate prayer

A year ago, within an hour, 120 seismometers all over the world started to record a freakish shake every 90 seconds like a metronome. People watching the waves were baffled. And even more so that it didn’t stop within a few minutes but continued on all day and night, eventually ringing out for nine days.

It turned out to be a landslide in an oddly shaped fjord in Eastern Greenland. A 1.2 kilometre mountain of rock and ice had collapsed, sending a 110m wall of water 10 kilometers across the gorge to smash 200 metres up the other side of the fjord. The water then came back down and the return wave apparently kept slopping back and forward for nine days. Spare a thought for the fish.

Dickson Fjord before (left) and after (right) the landslide. From Scientific American andSøren Rysgaard (left); Danish Army (right)

Thus “10,000 swimming pools” worth of repeating tsunamis keep rattling seismic detectors for days and then kept 68 scientists busy for a year figuring out what it was.

Predictably, they say, it was caused by climate change, because rock slides and ice collapses […]