Magma activity under Greenland's ice

Same Livescience.com web site, two days apart. First, we look at the "Oh my God, people are killing the screaming earth" and "look at me I am a drama queen scientist" story, a report from  a really poor writer.  Just read the first paragraph out loud and weep for humanity:

Dec 11, 2007:  Ominous Artic Melt...

WASHINGTON (AP)—An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point.[I think this site could use an editor] One even speculated [Oh no!] that summer sea ice would be gone in five years. Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press.

"The Arctic is screaming,'' said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government's snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo.

Just last year, two top scientists [Do you believe this crap] surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.

This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions.''

So scientists in recent days have been asking themselves these questions: Was the record melt seen all over the Arctic in 2007 a blip amid relentless and steady warming? Or has everything sped up to a new climate cycle that goes beyond the worst case scenarios presented by computer models? [I wonder if the author should have said "All scientists". Frankly, I worry about people who ask themselves questions....]

"The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming,'' said Zwally, who as a teenager hauled coal....    [Oh please. Let me stop this before I bleed out.]

Now for the "Oh, never mind" story: 

Dec 13: Magma May Be Melting Greenland Ice

SAN FRANCISCO—Global warming may not be the only thing melting Greenland. [See the homage that has to be paid to the new religion.] Scientists have found at least one natural magma hotspot under the Arctic island that could be pitching in. [Oh, just a hotspot on the earth under the glacier.]

In recent years, Greenland’s ice has been melting more and flowing faster into the sea—a record amount of ice melted from the frozen mass this summer, according to recently released data—and Earth’s rising temperatures are suspected to be the main culprit.

But clues to a new natural contribution to the melt arose when scientists discovered a thin spot in the Earth’s crust under the northeast corner of the Greenland Ice Sheet where heat from Earth’s insides could seep through, scientists will report here this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

“The behavior of the great ice sheets is an important barometer of global climate change,” said lead scientist Ralph von Frese of Ohio State University. “However, to effectively separate and quantify human impacts on climate change, we must understand the natural impacts too.”

The corner of Greenland where the hotspot was found had no known ice streams, the rivers of ice that run through the main ice sheet and out to sea, until one was discovered in 1991. What exactly caused the stream to form was uncertain.

“Ice streams have to have some reason for being there,” von Frese said, “and it’s pretty surprising to suddenly see one in the middle of the ice sheet.” [Bush did it.]

The newly discovered hotspot, an area where Earth’s crust is thinner, allowing hot magma from Earth's mantle to come closer to the surface, is just below the ice sheet and could have caused it to form, von Frese and his team suggest.

“Where the crust is thicker, things are cooler, and where it’s thinner, things are warmer,” von Frese explained. “And under a big place like Greenland or Antarctica, natural variations in the crust will makes some parts of the ice sheet warmer than others.”

What caused the hotspot to suddenly form is another mystery.

“It could be that there’s a volcano down there,” he said, “but we think it’s probably just the way the heat is being distributed by the rock topography at the base of the ice.”

A bonus note from the NSF in 1997 

FEATURE:
"BAKED ALASKA" MUD VOLCANO
DISCOVERED IN NORTH ATLANTIC

Researchers on a cruise have confirmed that a hot mud volcano on the sea floor between Greenland and Norway is oozing mud, seeping gas and spewing a gas-laden plume of warm water into the North Atlantic. Frozen methane hydrate caps the volcano, whose slopes are inhabited by a new species of tube worm most closely related to a group found in Antarctica.

The rare juxtaposition of heat vents on the sea floor with a frozen methane cap has led Hunter College geophysicist Kathleen Crane, who studied the feature on a cruise last August, to dub it a "baked Alaska" complex. The methane hydrate is a white, ice like solid made up of water and gas that can compress a huge amount of gas within its crystal lattice.

Frozen methane has been found within the ocean floor but rarely, as in this case, atop the floor. Methane should dissolve or oxidize in sea water, so its presence suggests that it must be in constant production, according to Naval Research Laboratory geophysicist Peter Vogt, a chief scientist on the cruise. Another theory, however, is that some of the white features are actually bacterial mats.

On the latest cruise to investigate the site, using the Russian vessel Professor Logachev, scientists supported by the National Science Foundation, Naval Research Laboratory, Office of Naval Research and Russian and Norwegian institutions confirmed the existence of the mud volcano, a rare phenomenon in the deep ocean. Located 1250 meters deep, the volcano is about one kilometer in diameter, is encircled by a moat, and has "a gross cowpie shape," according to Vogt. The team, also led by Russian chief scientist Georgy Cherkashev, spotted a similar feature in the area that may be a second volcano.

The flow of heat rising within the volcano (up to one or more watts per square meter) is one of the highest measured in the ocean, apart from the boundaries of tectonic plates or "hot spots" such as Hawaii.

What is generating this heat and setting the gas, fluid, and mud into motion is still a mystery. Vogt suggests that the cause could be the gravitational instability of the marine sediments, which were deposited very rapidly by glaciers; or alternatively, the "dewatering" or extrusion of water by the sediments. Crane, on the other hand, proposes that the volcanism may indicate that an ancient fracture between the Greenland Sea oceanic crust and the Barents Sea continental crust is still active, serving as a crack for heat and fluids to rise up to the seafloor....