Geohazard and Climate adaption: impacts and interconnectivity

The forefront of science now is in bridging fields and making connections across different disciplines, challenging our current understanding of the Earth's changes and overall state. Some of the most challenging science questions now have to do with warnings for significant geohazards and Earth-Space systems' response to climate variability affecting adaptation processes, such as geosphere changes due to climate change and resultant strategies. In recent years, the study of pre-earthquake processes has led for example to developing the lithosphere-atmosphere-ionosphere-coupling concept. This in turn provides new information about the Earth's energy balance (Pulinets and Ouzounov, 2011). From space-born NASA and NOAA Earth observation of atmospheric conditions, we have shown the consistent occurrence of radiative emission anomalies in the atmosphere near or over regions of earthquakes, volcanoes, and geothermal fluxes. Our assessment shows that the latent heat released before major earthquakes is larger than the seismic energy released during the quake (Ouzounov et al., 2018). We find that the associated pre-earthquake phenomena for large events may create an additional thermodynamic contribution in the atmosphere and impact on climate, caused by sources of Earth de-gassing in the lithosphere and followed by ionization processes. Because of these findings, we start exploring major global geodynamics activities and their impact on atmospheric processes and climate through the geosphere coupling channels as a potential forward process of interaction between geohazards and climate adaptation. The reverse mechanism of climate adaptation's impact on geohazards is based on the initial idea that climate adaptation could force additional geohazards activities (McGuire, 2010). The removal of ice sheets may somehow or likely have permitted the release of stresses that had accumulated on previously confined faults, triggering earthquakes in the US, Canada, and Europe. How realistically is it to expect a change in the existing earthquake patterns in Europe, the USA, and Canada during climate change processes? It is plausible, but we do not yet know the answer. Our goal is to explore the coupling between geohazards processes and climate change processes through the lithosphere-atmosphere framework, focusing on dynamic environments, exhibiting a change in physical and thermodynamics processes over relatively small-time scales.