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Greenland registers tremors from Turkey earthquake

Tremors from the powerful earthquake that rocked Turkey and neighbouring Syria on Monday were felt as far away as Greenland, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland said.

Published: 6 February 2023 13:37 CET

Greenland registers tremors from Turkey earthquake

A file photo of Greenland, where tremors were measured on Monday from a devastating earthquake thousands of kilometres away in Turkey. Photo: Christian Klindt Sølbeck/Ritzau Scanpix

“The large earthquakes in Turkey were clearly registered on the seismographs in Denmark and Greenland,” seismologist Tine Larsen told AFP.

The first 7.8-magnitude quake struck at 04:17am local time at a depth of about 17.9 kilometres near the Turkish city of Gaziantep, which is home to around two million people, the US Geological Survey said.

“The waves from the earthquake reached the seismograph on the Danish island of Bornholm approximately five minutes after the shaking started,” Larsen said.

“Eight minutes after the earthquake, the shaking reached the east coast of Greenland, propagating further through all of Greenland,” she added.

Later, another 7.5-magnitude quake struck southeastern Turkey.

“We have registered both earthquakes — and a lot of aftershocks — in Denmark and Greenland,” she said.

Monday’s quake is the deadliest in Turkey since a 7.4-magnitude one in 1999 when more than 17,000 people died, including about 1,000 in Istanbul.

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Greenland temperatures warmest 'in 1,000 years'

“This confirms the bad news that we know already unfortunately … (It is) clear that we need to get this warming under control in order to stop the melting of the Greenlandic ice sheet”, climate physics associate professor Bo Møllesøe Vinther of the University of Copenhagen told AFP.

By drilling into the ice sheet to retrieve samples of snow and ice from hundreds of years ago, scientists were able to reconstruct temperatures from north and central Greenland from the year 1000 AD to 2011.

Their results, published in the scientific journal Nature, show that the warming registered in the decade from 2001-2011 “exceeds the range of the pre-industrial temperature variability in the past millennium with virtual certainty”.

During that decade, the temperature was “on average 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the 20th century”, the study found.

The melting of the Greenland ice sheet is already leading to rising sea levels, threatening millions of people living along coasts that could find themselves underwater in the decades or centuries to come.

Greenland’s ice sheet is currently the main factor in swelling the Earth’s oceans, according to NASA, with the Arctic region heating at a faster rate than the rest of the planet.

In a landmark 2021 report on climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the Greenland ice sheet would contribute up to 18 centimetres to sea level rise by 2100 under the highest emissions scenario.

The massive ice sheet, two kilometres thick, contains enough frozen water to lift global seas by over seven metres (23 feet) in total.

Under the Paris climate deal, countries have agreed to limit warming to well under 2C.

“The global warming signal that we see all over the world has also found its way to these very remote locations on the Greenland ice sheet”, Vinther said.

“We need to stop this before we get to the point where we get this vicious cycle of a self-sustaining melting of the Greenland ice”, he warned.

“The sooner the better”.

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