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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.
... but I’m not sure what’s going on with the idiots posting further up in this discussion.
In addition to Yellowstone, there’s the plume responsible for the Hawaiian Islands. Interestingly, as the tectonic plate shifts, the plume remains more or less in the same place below it. Currently it’s under the Big Island (obviously); you can see the direction that the plate is moving by looking at the chain of islands.
#DeleteChrome
It's a cover up, I'm sure of that. This is to cover up the discovery of an ancient powerful alien device. This device is called a "door to the heavens", it's a transportation device that uses "Rosen-Einstein bridges" through space-time to allow people to travel astronomical distances seemingly instantly. One was found buried among ancient Egyptian artifacts and the other more recently found buried in the Antarctic ice. I have little doubt the power of this device is melting the ice. Perhaps this device has also attracted some unwanted attention from alien species? If that's the case then they have much more to cover up.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Indeed, new data appears every day. The debate would be over tomorrow though if people accepted the economics of anything related to CAGW.
The reason we burn coal, oil, and natural gas is because they are cheap. We can say they are abundant, reliable, and energy dense but that's just another way of calling them cheap. Solar power is expensive because it's unreliable, diffuse, and not necessarily abundant where it's needed. People tend to want energy when it's cold and/or dark where they are, and this tends to happen with then sun isn't shining. Storing, moving, and converting energy adds costs which only adds to the expense of already expensive solar power.
How do we solve this problem? Look to energy sources that have a history of being cheaper than coal, oil, and natural gas. Those are wind, hydro, and nuclear. Wind and hydro suffer from many of the same problems as solar, such as not always being available where and when it's needed, which can add to the cost. Nuclear doesn't have this problem, it can be placed most anywhere we need it. We've even put this energy source to work on ships at sea.
I guess we could say the debate is in fact over, use more nuclear power. We do that then we have cheap and clean power and we'll just have to find something else for congresscritters to prop up as a bogeyman to get us to vote them back into office again and again.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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.
It has taken way too long to scroll down to this first on-topic post. But correcting the moderator system to limit the damage by paid trolls is another topic.
I have a serious question about the Antarctic mantle plume(s):
The Erebus plume under Ross Island has been documented ever since the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957 and probably earlier. So has a second plume been discovered in the same area? Or is this story about confirmation of what was already known? WTF?
Hopefully answers to this question will not get drowned by the paid trolls (and what I suspect may be paid troll fighters who keep the sewer floodgates open).