"Consider this: as ice sheets melt, they take weight off land, and that can trigger earthquakes — seismic activity is already increasing in Greenland and Alaska. Meanwhile, the added weight of the new seawater starts to bend the Earth’s crust. “That will give you a massive increase in volcanic activity. It’ll activate faults to create earthquakes, submarine landslides, tsunamis, the whole lot,” explained the director of University College London’s Hazard Centre. Such a landslide happened in Scandinavia about eight thousand years ago, as the last Ice Age retreated and a Kentucky-size section of Norway’s continental shelf gave way, “plummeting down to the abyssal plain and creating a series of titanic waves that roared forth with a vengeance,” wiping all signs of life from coastal Norway to Greenland and “drowning the Wales-sized landmass that once connected Britain to the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany.” When the waves hit the Shetlands, they were sixty-five feet high."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Non-fiction authors from the United StatesJournalists from the United StatesPeople from CaliforniaEnvironmentalists from the United StatesOrators from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out Food-system collapse, sea-level rise, disease...Is it Too Late?, Rolling Stone by Bill McKibbon, (9 April 2019)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_McKibben
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Bill McKibben
34 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Bill McKibben →
Related Quotes
"An idea, a relationship, can go extinct, just like an animal or a plant. The idea in this case is 'nature,' the separ…"
"The greenhouse effect is a more apt name than those who coined it imagined. The carbon dioxide and trace gases act li…"
"The expected effects of a sea-level rise typify the many consequences of a global warming. On the one hand, they are …"
"We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information '…"
"It worries me because it alters perception. TV, and the culture it anchors, and drowns out the subtle and vital infor…"
"Human beings—any one of us, and our species as a whole—are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is…"
"They'll lead us bit by bit toward the revolutionary idea that we've grown about as powerful as it's wise to grow; tha…"
"These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. …"
"Right now, plenty of people feel the peacefulness of their lives degraded by sprawl, or worry about the way consumeri…"
"Our comforting sense of the permanence of our natural world, our confidence that it will change gradually and imperce…"