Prof. Arthur Viterito

My name is Arthur Viterito. I’m a retired professor of physical geography, and I'm happy to be participating here in the Global Crisis. Time for Truth conference here on December 4th. 

I was asked by a student a number of years ago if the number of earthquakes on the planet had been increasing. And I said, “Yeah, they have slightly,” but I haven't looked at the data carefully. And when I looked at the data carefully, I started to see some things that intrigued me. And what intrigued me most was the fact that the number of earthquakes was starting to increase rapidly on the oceans’ floors. 

The oceans contain about 1000 times the amount of heat that the atmosphere has. So if you will, the ocean has been called the great flywheel of climate. So, if we can intensify what we call the thermohaline circulation, first, let's look at this greater geothermal flux. Geothermal, of course, is heat that emanates out from the mantle of the Earth. It's what we see in active volcanoes, geysers, hot springs. And we see that the vast majority of geothermal heat on the planet has its origins at the ocean floor. 

And this diagram here by Davies & Davies shows in red, where most of the geothermal heat for the planet is emanated. And we can see that it perfectly matches up with the parts of the Earth's crust that are splitting apart. These are what we call the Mid-Ocean Spreading Zones. And if we look at the Mid-Ocean Spreading Zones, we see that high earthquake activity in these regions indicates high flow of geothermal heat in these regions. So for the purposes of this discussion, we're going to refer to what I call "MOSZSA" (Mid-Ocean Spreading Zones Seismic Activity).

MOSZSA is a good proxy for the amount of geothermal flux. To this purpose I've catalogued the number of seismic or earthquake events in the four to six range of what's called the moment magnitude range. That is, as you have more earthquakes in these Mid-Ocean Spreading Zones, you will have a greater release of geothermal heat. And I've tracked this, I've looked at the seismic activity in the Mid-Ocean Spreading Zones. And here's the chart. 

So, we know that we have greater geothermal flux because we have a lot more earthquake activity down on the ocean floor. And what this will do is it intensifies what we call the thermohaline circulation. On the planet, the thermohaline circulation, also called the Meridional Overturning Circulation, or MOC, is driven by these density differences of temperature and salinity. And the oceans circulate in the giant conveyor belt and we call this “deep convection”. 

Ocean Geothermal Heat is a significant forcing that can weaken the stability of the water column. It warms the bottom water. And when you warm the bottom water, you strengthen the thermohaline circulation. This is a well established fact in oceanography: if you heat the bottom through geothermal heating, what is going to happen is that this conveyor belt is going to move faster. And the faster this moves, the more heat gets pushed up into the Arctic. And this is a critical mechanism that we have to pay careful attention to.

It has been shown that the overall circulation of the ocean has increased. And this is what the temperature field looks like. And you can see here the areas in red, primarily, in the central and northern Atlantic have been running much, much warmer than normal, and they arrived at this state starting in 1995. But that is these anomalously high temperatures giving us what we call a positive AMO which is the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, it has been around since 1995.

Here we see a shot taken from the NASA Earth Observatory in 1979. Here you can see on a typical day the extent in 2007. We can see that it's been greatly reduced. And this is very, very important because as you melt snow and ice, you produce what is referred to as a positive feedback. So the net effect of all this - intensification of the greater geothermal flux which intensifies the thermohaline circulation, which increases oceanic heat transport in the Arctic, which also reduces snow and ice - results in increased Arctic temperatures.

The reason we started this in 1979 is because this is the first year that satellite temperature data became available on a global scale. The Mid-Ocean Spreading Zone seismic activity plus global temperature is the bar graph in blue. Global temperatures are the curve in red. We find that the temperatures lag the mid-ocean seismic activity by two years. We see that these two curves match up very, very nicely. The correlation coefficient on this is 0.72, which is statistically significant and very high.

1995 was a very, very important year because it was an inflection point in global temperatures, that is the Mid-Ocean Seismic Activity and consequently geothermal release suddenly spiked up in 1995. And we see that a number of other geophysical phenomena also change in 1995 because it's all connected.

That is well documented [by] a researcher by the name of James Kamis. He has documented these fluxes under the ice sheets, and we do know, and we do have very good data that shows that, yes, a lot of the ice melt from Antarctic and Greenland is geothermally related. 

There's still a lot that we have to learn about climate change. And I believe that I have found a small piece of that, that is, I believe that seismic activity, which has been largely ignored in the literature, is one of the drivers of that climate change, and we need to explore it more and we need to better integrate it into other understandings that we have about climate change.

I believe in humans first, and I believe that we should exercise good stewardship, but that we should all try to take care of each other.