Good morning all....its 50 deg and very dry here in suburbia. So, I opened my basement windows, shut off the energy guzzling, CO2 producing (at the non-nuclear power plants) dehumidifier, and used the $ savings to buy beer. I'll follow Daniel Boone's recommendation on the movie "Day after tomorrow". Yes, I'm well aware of the science problems, but for some reason did not let them bother me too much.
JK, CN, and SH in the City by the Sea,in collaboration with several at USGS, and I are working on a global warming-related project, which in turn is related to earthquakes. We are using high-resolution seismic reflection data to map out horizons that were deposited under influence of sea level in the last half million years. During glacial times sea level drops about 100 or 120 m, and sediment is not deposited on the shelves of the mainland, it goes right into the Santa Barbara basin (it is deposited on the shelves north of the islands because they are sinking and making room for the sediment, even at low sea level). The pattern of erosion and deposition is such that we can pick horizons that were deposited at the end of the ice ages (we think). JK was chief scientist of a 200 m Ocean Drilling Program corehole that drilled back to 160,000 year sediment. They found the same climate signal that was found in Greenland Ice cores...including sudden warmings, that can occur in (I should double check this...) as little as a decade. These are not small warmings. There is a fold, an anticline, in the hanging-wall above the Oak Ridge fault, that has been propagating westward into the deep Santa Barbara basin. The Oak Ridge fault is part of the same system of South-dipping faults on which the Northridge earthquake occurred. The anticline is taking older strata that had been deposited in the basin and uplifting them to be eroded at the seafloor by waves during low stands of sealevel (ice ages). There, we will take shallow cores, that will be studied to determine if the layers were deposited in a glacial or interglacial time. If our results are good, then we will write a proposal to use a system that can core deeper, to get a continuous record of climate back to about 1/2 million years. The past glacial-interglacial cycle is very well dated. Having this age control can be used to study activity on the fault(s) and fold(s) through time. Faults may be active for periods and then less active. Faults may cut to the surface part of the time and then not reach the surface, but instead have their slip absorbed in a fold, another part of the time (and this can and does change along the strike of the fault.
Chris