The level of activity of the earth's crust under Europe has prompted a call for a co-operative topographical study, writes Dick Ahlstrom.
The earth really does move for many Europeans. The ground beneath our feet rises and falls and drifts about to a much greater extent than we ever realised.
For this reason a Dutch expert will argue for a more co-ordinated approach to the study of Europe's topography when he delivers a public lecture this evening in Dublin.
The director of the Amsterdam-based Netherlands Research Centre for Integrated Solid Earth Science, Prof Sierd Cloetingh, delivers a free public lecture this evening at 8pm in the Robert Emmet Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin, looking at how our landscape changes due to geological processes deep within the earth.
"In the last few years we are increasingly realising there is a far stronger connection between the deep earth and the surface," says Cloetingh.
This isn't only in the active zones where crustal plates crash and grind into one another to trigger earthquakes and volcanoes, he says. These cause horizontal movements, whereas changes deep underground also cause uplift and sinking in the centre of crustal plates that can have profound effects for people at the surface.
The Carpathian Mountains which run from Slovakia and Poland through Ukraine and into Romania provide examples of this, Cloetingh maintains.
The crust beneath the Carpathians is reckoned to be the thinnest in Continental Europe, he says, which allows ready deformation of the crust at the surface.
He cites the rapid scouring of the River Danube's channel in the Carpathians as an example. "The River Danube is cutting through the Carpathians which are rapidly uplifting," he says.
This has left the river's surface a full 500m below where the river formerly flowed. It also dumps huge amounts of silt and debris into the Black Sea which affects the river's delta and the sea itself.
Another example is the "Focsani Depression", a deep basin in the southern bend of the Carpathians in Romania. It holds 16-million-year-old sediments 13km deep and the entire region is experiencing significant subsidence. This region is now much more prone to flooding as a result, says Cloetingh.
The talk tonight is a "statutory public lecture" organised by the School of Cosmic Physics within the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Cloetingh will discuss these topological changes and a project called "Topo-Europe", an effort to foster much closer collaboration between Europe's geological researchers.
The Institute is involved in this work, explains the director of the school of cosmic physics, Prof Alan G Jones. He studies the earth's lithosphere, which reaches from the surface down to depths varying from 100km to 300km.
This zone is known as the asthenosphere, Jones explains, where the extreme heat, about 1,350 degrees, makes the rocks go plastic, "soft enough to allow the crust to float on it", he says.
He is involved in Topo-Europe and will send two graduate students off on a project to carry out electromagnetic readings along a 900km line running from Madrid to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.
They will have highly sensitive devices able to measure magnetic fields in rocks hundreds of kilometres underground. The fields will be just one 10 millionth of the earth's own magnetic field, much less than the field produced by a child's horseshoe magnet.
"I am involved in projects where we try to understand geophysical processes," says Jones. "We are trying to understand how the earth works."
More on Topo-Europe can be found at: http://www.geo.vu.nl~topo/