Volcanoes are not the main reason for melting Antarctic ice

There have been very inaccurate stories on various websites claiming ......

"Volcanoes are the main reason for ice melting in Antarctica."

This is not the case.

The 'volcanoes' story is mainly a misreading of research on the Thwaites glacier.
This is the actual paper on this research......
"Evidence for elevated and spatially variable geothermal flux beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet" 

The Thwaites Glacier is behaving more like a warm-based glacier.



The geothermal heat from under the Thwaites glacier is small compared to the overall warming happening around Antarctica.
“It is true that there are active volcanoes in West Antarctica, and so there may have been some local changes, but in most cases, at most times, volcanoes are not erupting under the ice,” Richard Alley, a geologist at Penn State, told VICE News. 

“This paper doesn’t tell you anything about why the ice is now thinning.”

Eric Rignot, an earth science professor at University of California Irvine and a principal scientist at NASA, said geothermal heating causes a few millimetres of glacial melting each year.
Rising sea temperatures can melt up to 100 metres of a glacier each year, he said.
A photo of Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica taken by NASA Operation IceBridge. A new study finds a rapidly melting section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in an irreversible state of decline, with nothing to stop the glaciers in this area from melting into the sea. Credit: NASA     
A NASA photo of the Thwaites Glacier at the point it meets the ocean.
The Thwaites Glacier is one of a number of glaciers in that part of Antarctica.

The heat flow out of the crust is highest at the spreading ocean ridges.


Popular posts from this blog

Climate Change - The link with mass extinctions

Image
What is the worst-case scenario for climate change? The geological record shows that when the atmosphere suddenly changes, there are big effects on living things. Five major  mass extinction  events are recorded in the rock record of the last 600 million years. The biggest extinction was at the end of the  Permian , around 252 million years ago. It is called the  End-Permian mass extinction. Only about 8% of species survived to live on in the Triassic Period. This photo shows geologists investigating tilted sedimentary rocks at Shangsi in South China. Triassic rocks (at the top right) lie over the older Permian rocks. Each mass extinction in the rocks matches with a change in the chemistry of the rocks called a ' carbon excursion '. Some of the carbon excursions are 'negative CEs' and some are 'positive CEs'. Negative CEs  indicate that lots of gaseous carbon compounds escaped into the air, causing warming. These are sometime...
Read more

Climate Change - The Greenhouse Effect

Image
What do scientists mean by the " Greenhouse Effect "? When the Sun's energy arrives at the Earth, it travels through the air. Some is reflected back to space, but some hits the Earth and warms it. The warm Earth gives off  infrared radiation  with various wavelengths.   Some of those waves can pass back out of the air to space, but some are absorbed by certain gases in the air. The gases then re-emit the energy into the air. If there are more of those gases, less heat escapes into space. An extreme case has happened on Venus. Concentrated  'greenhouse gases'  on Venus have caused the surface temperature to rise to 735  Kelvin  (462 degrees C; around 900 degrees F) Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen quickly  since people began burning large quantities of fossil fuels. There was carbon dioxide in the air before that, at around 270 parts per million. Without any carbon dioxide, the Earth wo...
Read more

Climate Change - Coal and carbon dioxide

Image
Coal, oil and natural gas are  fossil fuels . When they are burned, they  change the Earth's atmosphere. How is that possible?       C oal  is a good example. Coal was formed  hundreds of millions of years ago . Geologists say that a three-metre (10-foot) coal seam took between  12,000 and 60,000 years  to form . Ancient trees and other plants lived, died and were fossilised. All those plants took  carbon dioxide  out of the atmosphere.  Some larger coal seams are, for example, 10 metres thick. They took around  40,000 years to form,  but have been mined and burned in a little over  100 years. The fastest rise of CO 2  in the air seen in   the ice core record (800,000 years)  is  20 ppm in 1000 years. The CO 2  level in the atmosphere is now rising at around  20 ppm per decade . The  carbon  joins up with  oxygen  when it burns. Eac...
Read more