Posted on January 20, 2008 - Filed Under Environmentalism
Hi Oz
As I look at your weather as it reads on our blog and I look at my own, the temperatures make it seem as if I am LIVING on a glacier! Brrrrrr!
I read however, that
Antarctic volcanoes identified as a possible culprit in glacier melting.
Tonight as the popular 60 Minutes was pulled from the regular television line up to have a documentary about Global Warming, they sure didn't mention this latest find.
I would say that if there is indeed volcanic activity, it would make sense that heat would be present.
Volcanically, Antarctica is a fairly quiet place. But sometime around 325 B.C., the researchers said, a hidden and still active volcano erupted, puncturing several hundred yards of ice above it. Ash and shards from the volcano carried through the air and settled onto the surrounding landscape. That layer is now out of sight, hidden beneath the snows that fell during the next 2,300 years.
Still, the layer showed up clearly in airborne radar surveys conducted over the region in 2004 and 2005 by American and British scientists. The reflected radio waves over an elliptical area about 110 miles, or 176 kilometers, wide were so strong that earlier radar surveys had mistakenly identified it as bedrock. Better radar techniques now can detect a second echo from the actual bedrock farther down.
The thickness of ice above the ash layer provided an estimate of the date of the eruption: 207 B.C., give or take 240 years.
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