Could volcanoes be driving Antarctic ice loss?
Magma movement Accelerating ice loss from the Antarctic icesheet could be due in part to active volcanoes under the frozen continent's eastern part, a study has found.
From 2002 to 2011, the average annual rate of Antarctic icesheet loss increased from about 30 billion tonnes to about 147 billion tonnes, the UN's panel of climate scientists reported in September.
The icesheet is a mass of glacial land ice - one such sheet covers most of Greenland and the other Antarctica, and together they contain most of the freshwater on Earth.
The sheets are constantly moving, slowly flowing downhill and seawards under their own weight. Portions that extend out over the water are called ice shelf.
Previous research has blamed warmer seas swirling in a circular fashion around Antarctica for the quicker pace of icesheet loss from the southernmost continent.
These waters erode ice shelves, and as more of the shelves disappeared, the quicker the sheet would flow and lose ice to the sea.
But in a new paper in the journal Nature Geoscience geologists led by Amanda Lough at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, suggested that, in West Antarctica, the faster flow may also be due to volcanoes.
These heat the underside of the ice, causing melting that lubricates the flow, they suggest.
Evidence for this comes from recently deployed sensors that recorded two "swarms" of seismic activity under Mary Byrd Land, a highland region of West Antarctica, in 2010 and 2011.
Using ice-penetrating radar, the team found an intriguing elliptically-shaped deposit, measuring about 1000 square kilometres in the area, at a depth of 1400 metres.
The deposit is believed to be volcanic ash, spewed out by an enormous eruption some 8000 years ago - an estimate reached on the assumption it has since been covered by ice accumulating at the rate of 12.5 centimetres a year.
"Together, these observations provide strong evidence for ongoing magmatic activity and demonstrate that volcanism continues to migrate southwards."
Several volcanoes were known to exist in West Antarctica, but none were thought to be active.
"Eruptions at this site are unlikely to penetrate the 1.2 to 2 kilometre-thick overlying ice, but would generate large volumes of melt water that could significantly affect ice stream flow," the researchers write.