North Pole Volcano Ice Shield

I was reading this morning on canada.com about underground volcanic activity in the North Pole regions and how it may or me not be contributing to global warming. The scientist geophysicist Robert Sohn of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The scientists sent three unmanned probes down through the ice to explore a 30-kilometre-long stretch of the ridge where a swarm of undersea earthquakes occurred in 1999. What they found was a remarkable under sea eruptions

Sohn says it would have been “spectacular to witness” the eruptions, but he says it is a good thing there is four kilometers of seawater on top of the Gakkel Ridge as the eruptions would have been “highly problematic” had they occurred on dry land. Reading this you’re forced to remember our old dinosaur buddies and how in a time long ago where there may not have been nearly as much water above the ridge how easy it was to have so many species wiped out in 1 swift blast of a 12km ridge volcano. If such thing was to happen even today so many billions of years later, it would still wipe us all out or very close to.

Sohn also was asked questions about global warming and the melting ice caps. Could these eruptions affect global temperature? Sohn doesn’t think that this heat is contributing to the melting of the ice, but he also says there no way to measure how much CO2 escaped into the ozone from these explosions, but is for certain that this contributed to the constant raise of green house gases in the atmosphere.

Read the whole story here on Canada.com

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