It is an enigma that has left seismologists around the world baffled for almost a year: an earthquake, detected in September 2023 by instruments all around the planet, which lasted nine days. An unprecedented event, with no explanation at first, but which finally found one: it was the collapse of an iceberg in Greenland that was the cause.
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It was unprecedented until then. On September 16, 2023, seismometers installed all over the planet began to vibrate and did not stop until nine days later. A long signal, frequencies different from those of a classic earthquake… The mystery was total.
It was finally a team of 68 scientists from all over the world who had the last word on the story. The source was in Greenland: it was a landslide, the collapse of a 1,200-meter-high peak into a fjord, which caused this tremor that made the entire Earth vibrate. Twenty-five million cubic meters of rock ended up in the water.
The impact was so great that it created a 200-metre-high wave. This quickly deflated as it bounced off the walls of the fjord for about ten days. This is what created the seismic waves.
At the origin of this cataclysm, there was therefore a glacier which retained all this rock. But made more fragile due to global warmingit eventually gave way. An event that makes the authors of the study fear that other landslides of this magnitude will occur elsewhere in the world.