Roberta Adamski
PA Representative
1571 Missouri Avenue
Bridgeville, PA 15017
Phone: (412) 8295-0132
Email:
My name is Roberta Adamski. My father passed away from lung cancer.
I am a wife and a stay at home mom with four beautiful children. I run and operate a nationwide mobile laundry service, Laundry Ladies LLC. I have a heart for service and a drive that never ends for what I believe in. Giving is built inside me and I enjoy sharing this gift I have with others!
Laundry Ladies LLC is a family owned and operated company that takes pride in our services. Roberta Adamski (Owner and Founder) and Alysha Meier (Owner) are sisters that began this business to help others.
We provide a laundry pickup and delivery service to individuals and small businesses that are in need of everyday laundering.
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damaging earthquake, “the numbers are small and are not statistically significant.”
But what about climate? Are there any connections between climate phenomena and earthquakes? We asked geophysicist Paul Lundgren of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, to do a scientific shakedown on the matter.
Weighing the Seismic Consequences of Water
In order to make any connection between climate and earthquakes, says Lundgren, you first have to determine what kinds of tectonic processes might be related to climate phenomena. Scientists know earthquakes can be triggered or inhibited by changes in the amount of stress on a fault. The largest climate variable that could change fault stress loads is surface water in the form of rain and snow. Lundgren says several studies have supported such correlations. But there’s a catch.
“Typically, where we’ve seen these types of correlations is in microseismicity -- tiny earthquakes with magnitudes less than zero, far smaller than humans can feel,” he said. “Those occur quite frequently.”
Lundgren cited work by his colleague Jean-Philippe Avouac at Caltech and others, who’ve found a correlation between the amount of microseismicity in the Himalaya and the annual monsoon season. During the summer months, large amounts of precipitation fall on the Indo-Gangetic Plain, which encompasses the northern regions of the Indian subcontinent. This increases stress loads on Earth’s crust there and decreases levels of microseismicity in the adjacent Himalaya. During the winter dry season, when there’s less water weight on Earth’s crust in the plain, Himalayan microseismicity peaks.
Lundgren says it gets much more difficult, however, to make such inferences about larger earthquakes.
“We’ve seen that relatively small stress changes due to climate-like forcings can effect microseismicity,” he said. “A lot of small fractures in Earth’s crust are unstable. We see also that tides can cause faint Earth tremors known as microseisms. But the real problem is taking our knowledge of microseismicity and scaling it up to apply it to a big quake, or a quake of any size that people could feel, really.” Climate-related stress changes might or might not promote an earthquake to occur, but we have no way of knowing by how much.
“We don’t know when a fault may be at the critical point where a non-tectonic forcing related to a climate process could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, resulting in a sizeable earthquake, and why then and not earlier?” he said. “We’re simply not in a position at this point to say that climate processes could trigger a large quake.”
What About Droughts?
We know seasonal effects can cause changes on faults, but what about less periodic climate phenomena, like a long-term drought? Might they cause changes too?
As it turns out, changes in stress loads on Earth’s crust from periods of drought can, in fact, be significant. Research by JPL scientist Donald Argus and others in 2017 using data from a network of high-precision GPS stations in California, Oregon and Washington found that alternating periods of drought and heavy precipitation in the Sierra Nevada between 2011 and 2017 actually caused the mountain range to rise by nearly an inch and then fall by half that amount, as the mountain rocks lost water during the drought and then regained it. The study didn’t specifically look at potential impacts on faults, but such stress changes could potentially be felt on faults in or near the range.
Similarly, pumping of groundwater from underground aquifers by humans, which is exacerbated during times of drought, has also been shown to impact patterns of stress loads by “unweighting” Earth’s crust. Lundgren pointed to a 2014 study in the journal Nature by Amos et al. that looked at the effects of groundwater extraction in California’s Central Valley on seismicity on the adjacent San Andreas Fault. The researchers found that such extractions can promote lateral changes in stress to the two sides of the San Andreas, which move horizontally against each other along the boundary of two major tectonic plates. This could potentially cause them to unclamp and slip, resulting in an earthquake.