lets hope that the ice can always catch a grip as it settles down onto the rock.
I suspect that the earthquake / icequake is only the ice breaking off the rock underneath.
this sounds a little related to the reply I made a day or so ago
on another topic.
ie..
I know this sounds far fetched and even twilight zoney but just thinking about what would happen if a large ice mass were to lose its grip on the surrounding mountains or land mass due to expansion...and begin a quick slide into the ocean.
and as I said then I wish I had a map without the ice.
is there any way to determine if this slab could slide quickly into the sea?
this up and down action could remove what keeps it from continuing into the sea.
and there is really nothing we could do about it except
warn those in the path of the resulting tsunami / tsunami's.
here is something else about the ice sheet from 2006...
West Antarctic Ice Sheet .. Whillans Potential collapse of the WAIS
In January 2006, in a UK government-commissioned report, the head of the British Antarctic Survey, Chris Rapley, warned that this huge west Antarctic ice sheet may be starting to disintegrate, an event that could raise sea levels by at least 5 metres (16 ft). Estimates by others have ranged from 6 to 15 m (20–50 ft). Rapley said a previous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report playing down worries about the ice sheet's stability should be revised. "The last IPCC report characterized Antarctica as a slumbering giant in terms of climate change," he wrote. "I would say it is now an awakened giant. There is real concern." [4]
Rapley said, "Parts of the Antarctic ice sheet that rest on bedrock below sea level have begun to discharge ice fast enough to make a significant contribution to sea level rise. Understanding the reason for this change is urgent in order to be able to predict how much ice may ultimately be discharged and over what timescale. Current computer models do not include the effect of liquid water on ice sheet sliding and flow, and so provide only conservative estimates of future behaviour." [5]
James Hansen, a senior NASA scientist who is a leading climate adviser to the US government, said the results were deeply worrying. "Once a sheet starts to disintegrate, it can reach a tipping point beyond which break-up is explosively rapid," he said. [6]
Indications that climate change may be affecting the west Antarctic ice sheet comes from three glaciers, including Pine Island and Thwaites. Data reveal they are losing more ice - mainly through the calving of icebergs - than is being replaced by snowfall. According to a preliminary analysis, the difference between the mass lost and mass replaced is about 60%. The melting of these three glaciers alone is contributing an estimated 0.24 millimetres per year to the rise in the worldwide sea level[4]. There is growing evidence that this trend is accelerating: there has been a 75% increase in Antarctic ice mass loss in the ten years 1996-2006, with glacier acceleration a primary cause[7].
Polar ice experts from the U.S. and U.K. met at the University of Texas at Austin in March, 2007 for the West Antarctic Links to Sea-Level Estimation (WALSE) Workshop. The experts developed a new hypothesis to explain the observed increased melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. They proposed that changes in air circulation patterns brought on by a warming atmosphere has led to increased upwelling of warm water along the coast of Antarctica and that that warm water has increased the melting of the floating edge of the ice sheet.[8] Recently published data collected from satellites support this hypothesis, suggesting that the west Antarctic ice sheet is beginning to show signs of instability.[9]
