Deep Antarctic Volcanoes May Trigger Ice Loss in Antarctica

A new volcano has been discovered a kilometer under the ice sheet of West Antarctica. The volcano is undergoing slow combustion and the researchers think the heat generated by these volcanoes will trigger the melting of Antarctic ice sheets.

This volcano was found by a team of American researchers who laid down two crossing lines of seismographs, or automated-event-detection software, across West Antarctica's Marie Byrd Land between 2006 and 2010 to accumulate seismological information about the ice history of the place.

Presence of various volcanoes was known by the scientists but they didn't know whether they were active or not.

The scientists found that sub-glacial volcanic activities lead to formation of features like the 'Executive Committee Range', which refers to a mountain range comprising of five volcanoes, located in the north-south extending over 80 kilometers. The range was found to extend itself southwards at a pace of 9.6 km, over a span of one million year.

"There were big questions to be asked and answered. The goal was essentially to weigh the ice sheet to help reconstruct Antarctica's climate history," Doug Wiens, professor of earth and planetary science at Washington University in St. Louis and one of the project's principle investigators, said in a news release.

"But to do this accurately the scientists had to know how the earth's mantle would respond to an ice burden, and that depended on whether it was hot and fluid or cool and viscous," "The seismic data would allow them to map the mantle's properties," Wiens said further.

The research team visited East and West Antarctica to install seismographs to observe the seismic activities taking place there. They examined two swarms in February 2010 and March 2011, which took place 25 km and 40 km beneath the surface. The team tried figuring out the reason behind these activities and found that a new volcano was forming a kilometer under the ice, which is yet to be named.

"The events were weak and very low frequency, which strongly suggested they weren't tectonic in origin," said Amanda Lough, Wiens' PhD student. "While low-magnitude seismic events of tectonic origin typically have frequencies of 10 to 20 cycles per second, this shaking was dominated by frequencies of 2 to 4 cycles per second."

This study is also published in the Nov. 17 edition of Nature Geoscience.

Scientists expect the heat from these combusting sub-glacial volcanoes to speed up the ice sheet melting in the Antarctica raising the sea level.