Yes, earthquakes and global warming can be related

And no, we don't have alert systems that predict earthquakes before they happen

The New Jersey earthquake that shook much of the US Northeast last week spurred as many conspiracy theories as it did legitimate questions.

The area is not prone to major quakes as it lies nowhere near any major convergent fault lines — nothing like California or Alaska.

Minor faults in the area — specifically the Ramapo Fault — don’t typically generate the kinds of shaking observed last week.

But cracks exist everywhere in the crust of the Earth, and one of the more concerning topics among seismologists is what role climate change might be playing in reawakening long-dormant minor faults.

I was lucky enough to be in my senior year at Syracuse University in 2011 when a 5.8 magnitude earthquake in Virginia shook my classroom in New York.

My geology professor who taught me “Volcanoes and Earthquakes” the year before was very excited — after lamenting how the media discussed the quake (all scientists do this), he told me about how climate change and earthquakes were connected.

The two systems (climate and geology) operate on such dramatically different timescales and are driven by entirely different Earth systems that I had, in the early part of my education of climate science, thought the two rarely interacted.

Enter: Isostatic rebound (in academic circles we also call this process Glacial Isostatic Adjustments (GIA))

Isostatic rebound refers to the upward movement of Earth's crust following the removal of large ice masses such as glaciers or ice sheets.