Undersea Eruption
Climate Change: While the media scream that man-made global
warming is making the North Pole ice-free, another possible cause is as
old as the Earth itself. They just have to look deeper.
To the delight of Al Gore and the rest of the Gaia groupies,
scientists at the National Snow & Ice Data Center in Colorado are
predicting that the North Pole will be completely free of ice this
summer. The apocalyptic headlines already are starting to appear.
"From the viewpoint of science, the North Pole is just another point
on the globe, but symbolically it is hugely important," says the
center's Mark Serreze. "There is supposed to be ice at the North Pole,
not open water."
 From
a media standpoint, this is another sign of the apocalypse — proof
positive of man-made climate change. But we've heard this before.
In August 2000 the New York Times ran a piece claiming the pole was
free of ice for the first time in 50 million years, long before SUVs
roamed Earth. As earth scientist Patrick Michaels noted, "It was
retracted three weeks later as a barrage of scientists protested that
open water is common at or near the pole at the end of summer."
As reported in the June 26 edition of ScienceDaily, a research team
led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) has uncovered
evidence of massive undersea volcanic eruptions deep beneath the
ice-covered surface of the Arctic Ocean. "Explosive volatile discharge
has clearly been a widespread, and ongoing, process," according to the
WHOI team.
The WHOI researchers found that evidence of a series of strong
quakes and eruptions as big as the one that buried the ancient city of
Pompeii took place in 1999 along the Gakkel Ridge, an underwater
mountain range snaking 1,100 miles from the northern tip of Greenland
to Siberia.
Their first glimpse of the ocean floor 13,000 feet beneath the
Arctic ice through visual and sonar images showed an ocean valet filled
with flat-topped volcanoes over a mile wide and hundreds of feet high
that remain active. They're not like Mount St. Helens or Krakatoa, but
more like the less bombastic, oozing Kilauea variety that slowly built
the Hawaiian Islands.
Robert Sohn, WHOI geophysicist, lead author and chief scientist of
the July 27, 2007, Arctic Gakkel Vents Expedition, estimates that
exploding mixtures of lava and gas were expelled at speeds of more than
500 meters a second.
Sohn says the large volumes of CO2 gas that belched out of the
undersea volcanoes likely contributed to rising concentrations of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Is it possible that it these eruptions, part of an "ongoing
process," have played a part in whatever melting there has been of the
Greenland and Arctic ice sheets?
Scientists at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory have put
together a chart showing Arctic ice relatively stable until a
precipitous decline began in 1999 — the very year the Arctic eruptions
started.
Icebergs breaking away and polar bears supposedly drowning are good
theater, but they do not reflect reality. In April, the World Wildlife
Fund (WWF) published a study, based on last September's data, showing
Arctic ice has shrunk from 13 million square kilometers to just 3
million.
What the WWF didn't mention was that by March of this year the
Arctic ice had recovered to 14 million square kilometers and that
ice-cover around the Bering Strait and Alaska was at its highest level
ever recorded. Ice freezes. Ice melts. That's what ice does.
At the other end of Earth, we're told the Larsen B ice shelf on the
western side of Antarctica is collapsing. That part is warming and has
been for decades. But it comprises just 2% of the continent. The rest
is cooling.
At the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, hosted by
the Heartland Institute, keynote speaker Patrick Michaels of the Cato
Institute and the University of Virginia debunked claims of
"unprecedented" melting of Arctic ice. He showed how Arctic
temperatures were warmer during the 1930s and the vast majority of
Antarctica is indeed cooling.
Earth is not a museum, but a geologically active place that reminds
us frequently how relatively puny our activities are. The WHOI's voyage
to the bottom of the sea shows it is climate alarmists who are skating
on thin ice. Source
|
All Stories 
