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Volcano Discovered Smoldering Under a Kilometer of Ice in West Antarctica: Heat May Increase Rate of Ice Loss http://apocadocs.com/s.pl?1384743451
... In the meantime, automated-event-detection software was put to work to comb the data for anything unusual.
When it found two bursts of seismic events between January 2010 and March 2011, Wiens' PhD student Amanda Lough looked more closely to see what was rattling the continent's bones....
Will the eruptions punch through a kilometer or more of ice above it?
The scientists calculated that an enormous eruption, one that released a thousand times more energy than the typical eruption, would be necessary to breach the ice above the volcano.
On the other hand a subglacial eruption and the accompanying heat flow will melt a lot of ice. "The volcano will create millions of gallons of water beneath the ice -- many lakes full," says Wiens. This water will rush beneath the ice towards the sea and feed into the hydrological catchment of the MacAyeal Ice Stream, one of several major ice streams draining ice from Marie Byrd Land into the Ross Ice Shelf.
By lubricating the bedrock, it will speed the flow of the overlying ice, perhaps increasing the rate of ice-mass loss in West Antarctica.
"We weren't expecting to find anything like this," Wiens says.
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[Read more stories about:
arctic meltdown, ocean warming]
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'Doc Jim says:
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If Antarctica belches a volcano, and nobody hears it, we can act as if that nothing happened at all.
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