Antarctica lost a very small area
of ice from 2010 to 2016,
as warmer ocean water
eroded its floating edge,
a study found.
About 1,463 square kilometers
of Antarctica’s underwater ice
melted between 2010 and 2016.
What does 1,463 fewer
square kilometers
of ice mean?
The total area of Antarctic sea ice
averages about
11 million square kilometers.
The 1,463 vs. 11,000,000
is one part in 7,500,
or 0.013%, melted.
Most likely
less than the margin of error
of the measurements!
But the three-dimensional
ice VOLUME
is what really matters,
not the two dimensional
ice AREA.
The percentage of the volume of ice
that melted is even smaller.
The Antarctic Ice Sheet
covers 14 million square kilometers
and is two kilometers thick,
so there are 29 million cubic kilometers
of ice (not counting sea ice).
The volume of ice
that melted
is 0.005%.
If this six year long trend continues,
Antarctica will melt in 118,933 years.
How much of this melting is
due to nearby underseas volcanoes?
A 2015 seismic survey found
there is superheated rock
60 miles below West Antarctica.
There are many known
underseas volcanoes
and more we still don’t know about.
How could CO2 in the atmosphere
cause a few small spots of Antarctica to warm,
while the rest of the continent cools?
Much more likely is the hot magma,
at 1,200C., causing nearby, small areas
to have some melting?
The large chart below shows
ice sheets that are melting (red arrows),
most of which just happen to be
located near areas of the sea
heated by underseas volcanoes (red dots).
Sources:
• Melting ice sheets: Dr Hannes Konrad et al, Net retreat of Antarctic glacier grounding lines. Nature Geoscience doi.org/10.1038/s41561-018-0082-z
•
• Volcanoes: Maximillian van Wyk de Vries, Robert G. Bingham and Andrew S. Hein (2017) A new volcanic province: an inventory of subglacial volcanoes in West Antarctica Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 461, 29 May 2017. doi.org/10.1144/SP461.7