Antarctic Volcanoes a Possible Culprit for Glacier Melting

Listening to Radio 4's the Material World last night on the way home to see my beloved, I ended up listening to a programme about antarctic volcanoes and the affect they may be having on the thinning of Glaciers in the Antarctic. In this day and age I find it amazing that we keep discovering so much that is new about our planet and how it works. As the blurb on the Radio 4 web site says

You don’t really expect to find volcanoes under the polar ice caps, but this is exactly what scientists at the British Antarctic Survey say they have found.

Could evidence discovered using new radar techniques be proof of the biggest volcanic eruption in the Antarctic in the last 10,000 years?

I then poked around with Google to see more about this as it intrigued me somewhat.

Amongst the comments and articles was the following

Antarctic volcanoes identified as a possible culprit in glacier melting

Another factor might be contributing to the thinning of some of the Antarctica's glaciers: volcanoes.

In an article published Sunday on the Web site of the journal Nature Geoscience, Hugh Corr and David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey report the identification of a layer of volcanic ash and glass shards frozen within an ice sheet in western Antarctica.

"This is the first time we have seen a volcano beneath the ice sheet punch a hole through the ice sheet" in Antarctica, Vaughan said.

Volcanic heat could still be melting ice to water and contributing to thinning and speeding up of the Pine Island glacier, which passes nearby, but Vaughan said he doubted that it could be affecting other glaciers in western Antarctica, which have also thinned in recent years. Most glaciologists, including Vaughan, say that warmer ocean water is the primary cause of thinning.

Whilst agreeing that the Volcano may be causing some of the thinning he then says he doesn't think it is causing all the problems. Now if I had just discovered this Volcano, I know my thoughts might be where there is one might there not be more. Worth visiting the following site on Mt Erebus which is not far away and one of the few volcanoes on earth with a long lived lava lake.


This may be another piece of the puzzle in the Global Warming debate.

A press release on the matter is here and you can pay for the full paper here.



Press Release - First evidence of under-ice volcanic eruption in Antarctica - British Antarctic Survey