Twenty-two researchers from nine institutions and four countries collaborated on the report, published in the academic Nature journal’s June issue.   “The generation of magmas in the earth proved far more complicated than anyone imagined,” wrote Henry J. B. Dick, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), which fronted the report.  Researchers found volcanoes “as far as we could survey to the east,” samples of “abundant active hydrothermal venting in a region where current theory predicted their absence.”

The report coincides with recent media buzz about a comment from Dr. Mark Serreze of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.  “I’d say it’s even-odds whether the [magnetic] North Pole melts out,” Serreze told Independent science editor Steve Connor.  The resulting article ran under the headline, “Exclusive: No ice at North Pole,” presenting the “unthinkable” disappearance of ice as “one example of the impact of global warming on the planet.”

It really is a problem, insists Andy Revkin, who keeps an environmentalist blog for the New York Times.  And it really is global warming, not volcanoes: “Keep in mind it’s two miles below the sea ice,” Revkin said in response to the reports of volcanoes along Gakkel ridge, “with thick intervening layers of water that don’t exchange much heat.”  ABC News thinks differently of water, apparently. “Less sea ice means more dark open water to absorb the heat, which melts the sea ice even further,”one article noted, declaring that the whole Arctic could experience it’s “First Ice-Free Summer This Year.”