On June 22, a team of scientists from the University of Rhode Island and University of East Anglia announced in a paper published in Nature Communications that they had discovered a new factor in the rapid melting of Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier – a previously unknown active volcano buried deep under the ice.
When combined with another scientific study released in 2017 by a team of scientists from the University of Edinburgh, which
announced the existence of 91 volcanoes buried under West Antarctica’s ice sheets in addition to the 41 previously discovered, a disturbing conclusion is reached. West Antarctica’s ice sheets are being rapidly melted from a vast network of buried volcanoes, which are far more active than scientists previously thought possible.
The June 22 paper, “
Evidence of an active volcanic heat source beneath the Pine Island Glacier” summarized what is currently known of volcanoes that make up the West Antarctic Rift System (WARS):
To date, as many as 138 volcanoes have been identified throughout West Antarctica9, including the presently active Mt. Erebus10 along the Terror Rift, as well as Mt. Siple10 and Mt. Waesche11, which both show evidence of recent activity. However, the locations and extent of volcanic activity along the WARS are debated, because many of these 138 known volcano-like features are buried beneath several kilometers of ice, and some evidence suggests that much of the interior subglacial WARS is dormant.
The assumption that the majority of West Antarctica’s volcanoes are dormant is increasingly being challenged by new scientific discoveries. Telltale signatures of volcanic activity are being found in ocean waters as evidenced from rare isotopes such as Helium-3, which was used by the authors of Pine Island Glacier paper to reach their conclusion.
In addition, heat increases and seismic activity in Antarctica points to large amounts of magma moving deep below the West Antarctic Ice Sheets (WAIS), as the
June 22 paper suggested:
The apparent surface deformations in the WAIS thickness also suggest localized heat fluxes that are most likely volcanic due to their intensity14,15, while ash layers from ice cores reveal more recent eruptions16. Last, the detection of earthquakes as recently as 2010 suggest magma migration beneath the Executive Committee mountains, in a region of Marie Byrd Land where seismic studies have revealed thin crust and low-density mantle material beneath.
According to Professor Karen Heywood, one of the co-authors of “
Evidence of an active volcanic heat source beneath the Pine Island Glacier”:
The discovery of volcanoes beneath the Antarctic ice sheet means that there is an additional source of heat to melt the ice, lubricate its passage toward the sea, and add to the melting from warm ocean waters. It will be important to include this in our efforts to estimate whether the Antarctic ice sheet might become unstable and further increase sea level rise.
While the June 22 paper focused on the impact of the buried volcano melting the Pine Island Glacier, the wider impact of other buried volcanoes on the West Antarctic Ice Sheets (WAIS) was briefly
mentioned in the abstract:
Our finding of a substantial volcanic heat source beneath a major WAIS glacier highlights the need to understand subglacial volcanism, its hydrologic interaction with the marine margins, and its potential role in the future stability of the WAIS.
The new findings about the influence of one or more active volcanoes to explain the rapid melting of Pine Island Glacier, along with the temperature increase and melt-offs observed elsewhere in the frozen continent all point to powerful transformative events in West Antarctica.
The following long-term temperature map of Antarctica alongside the newly discovered volcanoes, shows how and why West Antarctic is heating far more rapidly than East Antarctica.....
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| Left image shows temperature increase of Antarctica from 1956-2006 (Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio); right image shows 2017 discovery of 90 new volcanoes in Antarctica. |
