You know you did it as a kid, and your parents were none too happy when they caught you. Well, an article in today's Wall Street Journal [subscription only] reveal a new danger facing the earth.

Imagine the surface of Earth as a giant trampoline that accumulated a slab of ice over the winter, and you can get a sense of what a growing number of scientists say is in store for the planet as glaciers keep melting.

Once the trampoline's ice turns to water that drips over the edges in the warm days of spring, the concave elastic slowly rebounds to its original flat shape. That's how Earth responds as glaciers retreat, and the consequences promise to be ... interesting.

The reason is that one cubic meter of ice weighs just over a ton, and glaciers can be hundreds of meters thick. When they melt and the water runs off, it is literally a weight off Earth's crust. The crust and mantle therefore bounce back, immediately as well as over thousands of years. That "isostatic rebound," according to studies of prehistoric and recent earthquakes and volcanoes, can make the planet's seismic plates slip catastrophically, and cause magma chambers that feed volcanoes to act like bottles of shaken seltzer.

"It's unavoidable that glacial retreat will induce tectonic activity," says geoscientist Allen Glazner of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

And you've got all these researchers walking around on these glaciers with their heavy measuring equipment. They're removing ice cores weighing thousands of pounds collectively. They're sliding around on the glaciers, jumping up and down and doing all sorts of gross glacier-weight changing things.

What will Al Gore do about this new, inconvenient truth? Will he press for a law banning all human and animal activity atop glaciers? Force emigration from non-glacier covered areas to shrinking glaciers in an effort to nullify the weight change? Should we start putting very large rocks atop glaciers as they melt?

We must do something, otherwise San Francisco will suffer a catastrophic earthquake and tumble into the bay!

I'm going to take a nap.