According to a new study, 36% of the 1979-2017 Antarctic ice loss was from the Thwaites (pictured) and Pine Island glaciers.
Scientists believed this glacier melt was due to anthropogenic climate change “until recently.”
Now they say the glacier mass losses are due to the thin underlying crust and anomalously high geothermal heat in this region.
We’ve recently learned that “profound” cooling has been occurring for East Antarctica since the 1970s, and cooling (-1.68°C since 1979) has also extended to West Antarctica.
Another new study indicates Antarctica contributed just 0.76 of a centimeter to sea level rise from 1992-2017 or 0.3 of a millimeter per year.
Also, comparing 1997-2008 to 2009-2018, there has been a net advance in the ice extent for Antarctica during 2009-2018.
“Until recently, experts attributed these changes to climate change”
The profound ice loss from West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier has by itself been responsible for about four percent of the global sea-level rise in recent decades.
Possibly due to allegiance to “consensus” statements about anthropogenic global warming, it was still common for scientists to believe this glacier melt was due to the “warming” in Western Antarctica (that, as noted above, curiously has disguised itself as cooling since 1979).
But a new study and its AAAS/Science press release throw more cold water on the notion that humans are driving ice melt trends in Antarctica, as “there is a conspicuously large amount of heat from Earth’s interior beneath the ice” in the very locations where the ice melt is most pronounced.
“The direct transfer of heat can facilitate basal melting and control ice rheology and basal sliding“
While the Earth’s crust has an average thickness of about 40 km, in the region of the Thwaites, Pine Island, and Pope Glaciers, the anomalously thinner crust (10 to 18 km) exposes the base of this regional ice to 580°C tectonic trenches.
The “elevated geothermal heat flow band is interpreted as caused by an anomalously thin-crust underlain by a hot mantle,” which is exerting a “profound influence on the flow dynamics of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet.”
Read more at No Tricks Zone
Nothing can stop the truth.
Its always pleasing to know that something that you have been saying for years finally gets proven correct.
Mostly though it was common sense, you can’t possibly have the worlds largest and ACTIVE volcanic ridge under a block of ice and NOT have it melting it.
Its not Global Warming and it never was the Ice Melting is due to Geothermal Heat its not our Backyard BBQ.s or Family SUV’s after all
“Possibly due to allegiance to “consensus” statements about anthropogenic global warming, it was still common for scientists to believe this glacier melt was due to the “warming” in Western Antarctica (that, as noted above, curiously has disguised itself as cooling since 1979).”
AGW is very sneaky. It also hides in the deep ocean and makes properly sited, rural weather stations show net cooling. Very, very sneaky.
A top geophysicist in Japan, also a leading vulcanologist wrote to me about three years ago that the ice melt in part of Antarctica was due to geothermal heat eroding the base of the glacier cliffs, caused by many active volcano plugs there, nothing he said to do with man mad climate change. this does not stop the BBC etc using shots of these ice cliffs falling, and how it is all our fault. Science, UN IPCC style…….