Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Climate Change: Geologists Tackle Earth's Transformations

Geologists in the United States have focused closely this week on rapid landscape change driven by both earthquakes and volcanoes, as well as new insights into long term climate and resource risks. In Alaska, the United States Geological Survey reports that a magnitude seven point zero earthquake beneath Hubbard Glacier on December sixth triggered hundreds of landslides and snow avalanches across the Saint Elias Mountains, spanning southeast Alaska and into Canada. Preliminary remote sensing and a Yukon Geological Survey reconnaissance flight show slopes stripped of snow and rock, highlighting how seismic shaking in glaciated terrain can rapidly remodel valley walls and potentially dam streams or alter sediment delivery downstream.

Farther south in Hawaii, the United States Geological Survey Hawaiian Volcano Observatory continues to track the ongoing summit eruption of Kilauea. A new map released December twenty second shows that lava within Halemaumau crater now averages about sixty eight meters thick, with maximum thickness exceeding one hundred sixty meters, filling nearly four hundred hectares of the summit basin. A monitoring overflight on December second captured spattering lava deep in the north vent and bright yellow native sulfur deposits produced by degassing sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. These measurements document how quickly magma is rebuilding the summit floor that collapsed in twenty eighteen, offering a real time laboratory for understanding caldera infilling and gas driven mineral formation.

On the continental United States mainland, concern is rising over the stability of land and water resources. A recent Geological Society of America news release highlights that parts of the Willcox Basin in southern Arizona are sinking rapidly due to groundwater withdrawal, with subsidence threatening infrastructure and altering drainage. At the same time, another GSA release warns that drainage from abandoned coal mines could represent a significant and under counted source of carbon emissions, linking classic economic geology with climate change science.

Looking at Earths future, ScienceDaily reports new research identifying a missing feedback in the global carbon cycle that could cause warming driven by fossil fuel emissions to overshoot and, paradoxically, help push the planet toward a future ice age on geologic time scales. In Washington, the Interior Department and the United States Geological Survey have issued an expanded twenty twenty five critical minerals list, now including sixty minerals such as copper, uranium, metallurgical coal, and phosphate, underscoring how geologic supply, national security, and clean energy transitions are tightly intertwined. Worldwide, major conferences from the American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans to international geology and geophysics gatherings in Europe, Asia, and Africa are weaving these themes together, emphasizing that from sudden earthquakes to slow subsidence, geology remains central to understanding and managing a changing planet.

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