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NASA Discovers Mantle Plume That's Melting Antarctica From Below (newsweek.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Newsweek: Researchers at NASA have discovered a huge upwelling of hot rock under Marie Byrd Land, which lies between the Ross Ice Shelf and the Ross Sea, is creating vast lakes and rivers under the ice sheet. The presence of a huge mantle plume could explain why the region is so unstable today, and why it collapsed so quickly at the end of the last Ice Age, 11,000 years ago. Mantle plumes are thought to be part of the plumbing systems that brings hot material up from Earth's interior. Once it gets through the mantle, it spreads out under the crust, providing magma for volcanic eruptions. The area above a plume is known as a hotspot.
[I]n a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Seroussi and colleagues looked at one of the most well studied magma plumes on Earth -- the Yellowstone hotspot. The team developed a mantle plume model to look at how much geothermal heat would be needed to explain what is seen at Marie Byrd Land. They then used the Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM), which shows the physics of ice sheets, to look at the natural sources of heating and heat transport. This model enabled researchers to place "powerful constraint" on how much melt rate was allowable, meaning they could test out different scenarios of how much heat was being produced deep beneath the ice. Their findings showed that generally, the energy being generated by the mantle plume is no more than 150 milliwatts per square meter -- any more would result in too much melting. The heat generated under Yellowstone National Park, on average, is 200 milliwatts per square meter.
[I]n a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Seroussi and colleagues looked at one of the most well studied magma plumes on Earth -- the Yellowstone hotspot. The team developed a mantle plume model to look at how much geothermal heat would be needed to explain what is seen at Marie Byrd Land. They then used the Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM), which shows the physics of ice sheets, to look at the natural sources of heating and heat transport. This model enabled researchers to place "powerful constraint" on how much melt rate was allowable, meaning they could test out different scenarios of how much heat was being produced deep beneath the ice. Their findings showed that generally, the energy being generated by the mantle plume is no more than 150 milliwatts per square meter -- any more would result in too much melting. The heat generated under Yellowstone National Park, on average, is 200 milliwatts per square meter.
We're in an interglacial, coming out of an ice age...ice is SUPPOSED to melt. We're still a few degrees colder than the last interglacial, and if you look at the graphs they (their temps) do spike rapidly (for certain values of rapidly).
That said, the wiki is amusing for both saying AGW started a thousand years ago, and that dinosaur-farts caused the Jurassic global-warming. Also amusing is how our atmo can have a 'runaway tipping point', but the plume heating under the ice can't? Something something phase change latent heat
The US Department of Energy was created 40 years ago with the mandate to provide energy independence for the USA.
The primary job of the Department of Energy is nuclear safety. It is in charge of the country's nuclear weapons, nuclear reactors and nuclear waste. It also does energy research and other related things but nuclear safety comes first.
The nuclear cost problem is a regulatory problem.
If BMW had to design a car from scratch every time they built one, each one would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Same goes with nuclear. We don't build enough of them, so we don't become more skilled at doing it. So we over-engineer.
We should be designing a nuclear power plant, and building hundreds of identical ones in exactly the same way.
We should also encourage smaller, rather than larger and more expensive power plants. One can build smaller reactors on a production line rather than have to build them on site. This will drive down costs.
It is so hard to build nuclear plants that we can't create a production line of them in reality, and anyone who gets permission to build one wants to build the biggest they can, because that permission is hard to get.
Just curious how this may change the current thoughts on climate change impact on artic ice. TFA is pretty quiet about climate science. Perhaps theyâ(TM)re just scrambling?
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.