Mega-tsunami mystery solved source of seismic activity that shook the world for 9 days revealed

This ought to cause a wave of panic.Back in 2023, scientists were perplexed by a mysterious seismic signal that shook the world every 90 seconds for nine days.Now, two years later, satellite footage has revealed the frightening source of these vibrations — giant mega-tsunamis sloshing around a Greenland fjord, per a “Nature Communications” study.The massive walls of water — one of which measured 650 feet tall, or about half the height of the Empire State Building — were reportedly caused by the collapse of a massive mountainside that was triggered by a warming glacier, per the report.A total of 25 million cubic meters of rock and ice crashed into remote Dickson Fjord in East Greenland, the Daily Mail reported.This spawned colossal waves known as seiches that undulated back and forth in the water body for nine days like a giant bathtub or wave pool — hence the mysterious reverberations, Live Science reported.“That is an enormous wall of water bouncing back and forth,” study lead author Thomas Monahan, a graduate student in engineering science at the University of Oxford, told the Daily Mail.He estimated that the force exerted over the length of the fjord was 500 Giga Newtons, the “equivalent to the amount of force produced by 14 Saturn V rocket ships launching at once.”While this seismic phenomenon was felt around the world, there were no observations of these tsunamis or landslides to confirm the theory.Even a Danish military vessel that entered the fjord three days into the first seismic event didn’t observe the seiche rocking the planet.Thankfully, the Oxford researchers were able to fill in the blanks by analyzing data captured by the new Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, which, as the name suggests, tracks water on the surface of the ocean.

Using a tool called Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn), the tech can map 90% of all water on the ocean’s surface.The traditional tsunami-measuring method, satellite altimetry, ...