Under the water landslides

The climate change people generally ignore the actuality of catastrophic events in the past, eager to interpret all data from a climate angle. The idea is to emphasize joining the dots to a warming trend – and totally pass over what really happened. Or might have happened. The idea of space rocks impinging on events on earth, pole shift, raining meteors, or just an everyday blow out of a big volcano, is not their preferred explanation – but a few degrees of warmth is always accentuated. I wasn’t triggered by the story at https://phys.org/news/2023-05-scientists-climate-blame-antarctica-giant.html … but clearly sombody at Anthony’s blog thought otherwise – see https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/05/18/past-climate-change-to-blame-for-antarcticas-giant-underwater-landslides/ … which, incidentally, involves field research and some very interesting discoveries. Giant underwater landslides in Antarctica – that created tsunami waves in the Southern Ocean. They uncovered layers of weak, fossilised, and biologically rich sediments, hundreds of metres beneath the sea floor. We are going back to the Miocene, or thereabouts. These were found beneath an extensive area of landslides – some of which cut 100m into the sea bed. Going on, they attribute the landslides to earthquakes – and other seismic activity. They also emphasize the layers formed when Antarctica, or that part of Antarctica they explored, namely the Ross Sea, was 3 degrees celsius warmer than average temperatures in the modern world. It is at this point the climate change link is inserted, as part of the press release we might assume. They add that ice is melting in Antarctica and we are heading towards a big warming – and potentially more landslides, etc. All tosh of course and part of the process of getting published – or part of the propaganda issued by the university that procured the funds to do the research in the first instance. It is the way research works in the present climate – pun intended. The comments do not echo this simple interpretation of the climate add-on, and they go on mostly to rubbish the research without actually bothering to read it in full. One can download it and take your time, sat in your favourite armchair, to run through what they have to say. A shaking earth caused some very big landslides at some point in the geological past. The 3 degrees change suggest either plate movement since the event, or a shift in the position of the poles. You takes your pick.