Skip to comments.Fire And Ice - Volcanoes, Not CO2, Melt West Antarctic
Posted on 12/10/2013 4:42:46 PM PST by raptor22
Junk Science: Researchers have discovered a chain of smoldering active volcanoes under the West Antarctic ice sheet which happens to be the ice sheet that climate hysterics say is proof of man-caused global warming.
The 2004 science fiction movie "The Day After Tomorrow" and the operative word here is "fiction" opened with a portion of the West Antarctic ice sheet shearing off as a prelude to planetary doom.
But if the researchers depicted in the film had looked deep into the widening crevice, they might have noticed a string of active volcanoes lurking under nearly a mile of Antarctic ice.
Real-life researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have in fact discovered a chain of active volcanoes under the West Antarctic ice sheet. They weren't looking for them. They just detected unexplained seismic activity while doing measurements.
As part of an effort to analyze the ice sheet to help reconstruct Antarctica's climate history, the researchers set up two crossing lines of seismographs across Marie Byrd Land in West Antarctica. The instruments recorded at least two significant seismic events under the ice sheet.
"I started seeing events that kept occurring at the same location, which was odd. Then I realized they were close to some mountains, but not right on top of them," explained doctoral student Amanda Lough, lead author of a paper appearing in the November issues of the journal Nature Geoscience.
"My first thought was, 'OK, maybe it's just coincidence,'" Lough said.
"But then I looked more closely and realized that the mountains were actually volcanoes and there was an age progression to the range. The volcanoes closest to the seismic events were the youngest ones."