While the erupting Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland most recently held the world's attention with its showy plume of smoke and hatred for human flight, the...
LONDON — Airlines appealed to passengers to give up their seats to stranded travelers Saturday, as carriers across Europe attempted to clear a backlog of...
OSLO (Reuters) â€" Plane-free skies over Europe during Iceland's volcanic eruption may yield rare clues about how flights stoke climate change, adding to evidence from...
The Icelandic volcano whose recent eruption created air travel chaos across Europe has been giving news anchors as much trouble as travelers. Now Eliza Geirsdottir...
BERLIN (Associated Press) -- Airlines have lost at least $1.7 billion due to travel disruptions caused by the volcanic ash cloud from Iceland, an industry...
Think about it. You are suddenly stranded and it's not your fault. You are surrounded by people who you would never even talk to--let alone spend hours and days with--but there you are. And what becomes of it all?
Don't worry, as TS Elliot wrote, "This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper".
It is amazing, the cycles that drive our planet. The volcanos can attempt to cool us back down I suppose and then become dormant when the glaciers wax again (in our lifetimes? sadly -no) and on it goes. A positive feedback loop :-)
Netflyer: Don't worry, as TS Elliot wrote, "This is the way
Some of the worst volcanic eruptions of the Neogene period (the last five million years) have taken place during the ice ages. That means it was COLD. Plus there were far more volcanic eruptions furing the 19th century than the 20th (including a few real lallapaloozas, to use a technical term) Global warming has NOTHING to do with volcanic activity.
messy: Some of the worst volcanic eruptions of the Neogene period
Global warming is no big deal to mother nature- she deals in time spans of millions for years. Species come and go and we will have our time. We are a product of her and she reaps the consequences of her own creation. One day there will be no humans and the earth will be pristine. This might be 10 million years from now; just a blink in time in the grand scheme of things. so don't worry to much about the environment, worry about us.
Robster: Global warming is no big deal to mother nature- she
It is facinating but true that the NE North America, and I am sure other places in the world as well, are actually gaining altitude, rebounding. The total weight of ice and snow in the last ice age caused that plate to sink and it has been rebounding ever since that ice age ended.
Just think, Maine may be the only coastal state in the US to not lose costal land to the rising seas. Both events caused by global warming and glacial melt.
Marnie1: It is facinating but true that the NE North America,
Marrie1: "It is facinating but true that the NE North America, and I am sure other places in the world as well, are actually gaining altitude, rebounding."
The overall trend in arctic ice volume has been rapidly decreasing for decades:
I wonder how many of these heavily iced over areas also coincide with the required geological conditions of plate subduction zones/hot spots/rift valleys. While this theory hypothesis have an impact in places like Greenland I'm guessing the removal of ice weight along, say, the Andes wouldn't have the same effect on magma depth.
Timothy_Rich: I wonder how many of these heavily iced over areas
Herein lies on of the great difficulties of science--the determination of cause-effect relationships. The higher the complexity of the system and the greater its number of natural cycles the more difficult it becomes to isolate and identify cause and effect. Even when cause-effect relationships are conclusive there often remains the "chicken or egg" quandry regarding the relationship.
Sunspot records are our longest and most continuous with high confidence of their accuracy. Temperature records are comparatively skant, incomplete and anecdotal inspiring little confidence. The question of "Whose adjusted temperature numbers did you use?" comes to play during comparison.
SwampeastMike: "Global mean temperature and sunspot production for instance have a strong correlation"
Over the past two decades the number of sunspots have remained roughly constant while the earth has continued to warm. More importantly, sunspots are merely a proxy for solar radiation activity - and direct measurements have demonstrate the solar radiation trend has remained roughly constant (in fact there's been a slight decrease) since the 1960s, thus ruling out changes in solar radiation as a primary explanation for current global warming.
SwampeastMike: "Sunspot records are our longest and most continuous with high confidence of their accuracy."
Not even close to correct. Anecdotal sunspot records go back a few millennia while for example non-anectdotal ice core records go back hundreds of thousands of years.
SwampeastMike: "Temperature records are comparatively skant, incomplete and anecdotal"
As with direct observations of temperature, until the 19th century sunspot records too were "incomplete and anecdotal." Compared with proxy temperature records like ice core records, historical sunspot records are *very* incomplete and very anecdotal - no contest.
In any event and again, direct and comprehensive solar data demonstrate that solar radiation cannot explain current global warming.
Publicola: SwampeastMike: "Global mean temperature and sunspot production for instance have
Nice, specific reply. We ignore the ice core and geological records at our own peril. I'm no expert but I'm learnin'. Let's hope that the rest of the public is as well.
Ron_Shook: Publicola, Nice, specific reply. We ignore the ice core and
Publicola: "...thus ruling out changes in solar radiation as a primary explanation for current global warming"
According to a 2004 NASA study, "The Armagh Observatory temperature record is one of the longest available for study. A prominent feature of long-term temperature studies has been a general warming since the 1880s. Because both sunspot number and the aa-geomagnetic index have shown similar secular increases, a strong association between trends in global temperature on Earth and trends in the solar/geomagnetic cycle should be apparent." http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/papers/wilsorm/WilsonHathaway2006c.pdf
Publicola "sunspots are merely a proxy for solar radiation"
No. Around 1852 four astronomers noted that the period of the sunspot cycle was identical to the period of changes of geomagnetic activity at Earth, giving birth to the study of Sun-Earth connections we now call "space weather". http://windows2universe.org/sun/activity/sunspot_history.html
SwampeastMike: Publicola: "...thus ruling out changes in solar radiation as a
Thank you for your addition to the Socratic dialogue with such good humour! Regardless of whether global warming is anthropogenic or otherwise, there are mechanisms that the Earth uses to cool itself automatically. This, in specific, is what we ought not to discount.
Best wishes
DK
hp_blogger_DK Matai: Dear Friends Thank you for your addition to the Socratic
Your wording here suggests that you are under the impression that we may now be discounting said natural cooling. If that interpretation is correct, why are you under that impression?
Publicola: Dear, DK, Your wording here suggests that you are under
Like Pulicola, I also have some questions about what you are getting at.
Part 1:
I applaud your efforts to introduce ever more complex questions into the climate change debate, because if there is one thing that we can say with absolute certainty, it's that Gaia is a super complex beast and that our computer models, however complex, are but pale approximations of reality, colored by inadequate assumptions. We know that we are likely to anthropogenically tip over the apple cart, but where the apples will fall and their effects are probably well beyond our models.
"Global Warming" was the biggest descriptive naming blunder of the 20th century. This isn't a denier statement, in fact, just the opposite. It's been anthropogenic "Climate Change," from the git-go. The initial anthroponegic symtoms are a warming of the planet which would have happened eventually on its own consonant with the roughly 100,000 year glacial cycles that we can identify over the last near million years, as ice core and geological research make clear. By tipping the climate over millenia ahead of its natural time, I have to wonder if the effect is liable to be the premature onset of the next ice age. This has happened every time that we can look back into the past with any certainty? Today's climatologists focus almost exclusively on man made global warming fed by greenhouse gases, warming which has developed without man in the past, albeit considerably more slowly.
Ron_Shook: DK, Like Pulicola, I also have some questions about what
Richard2: "No serious person has proposed that man is causing volcanos to erupt."
----------------------------------------------------------
Ice cap thaw may awaken Icelandic volcanoes
OSLO (Reuters) - A thaw of Iceland's ice caps in coming decades caused by climate change may trigger more volcanic eruptions by removing a vast weight and freeing magma from deep below ground, scientists said on Friday...
"Our work suggests that eventually there will be either somewhat larger eruptions or more frequent eruptions in Iceland in coming decades," said Freysteinn Sigmundsson, a vulcanologist at the University of Iceland...
Carolina Pagli, a geophysicist at the University of Leeds in England, said there were risks that climate change could also trigger volcanic eruptions or earthquakes in places such as Mount Erebus in Antarctica, the Aleutian islands of Alaska or Patagonia in South America....
She and Sigmundsson wrote a 2008 paper in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters about possible links between global warming and Icelandic volcanoes.
That report said that about 10 percent of Iceland's biggest ice cap, Vatnajokull, has melted since 1890 and the land nearby was rising about 25 millimetres (0.98 inch) a year, bringing shifts in geological stresses.
They estimated that the thaw had led to the formation of 1.4 cubic km (0.3 cubic mile) of magma deep below ground over the past century...
Sigmundsson [said] melting ice seemed the main way in which climate change, blamed mainly on use of fossil fuels, could have knock-on effects on geology.
Then how do you explain the numerous volcanic eruptions over the past millennium? Benjamin Franklin blamed the major famine that occurred in Europe in the 1770s and '80s on volcanoes in Iceland that erupted for years and years. There were massive eruptions in the 19th century, too. That was without global warming.
Now the question is, why have the Cascades been so quiet? For the last hundred years, there's only been a pip at Mt. Baker in 1975, the eruptions at Mt. St. Helens since 1980, and Mt. Lassen in the 1910s. IN the previous century, every single volcano went off.
messy: Then how do you explain the numerous volcanic eruptions over
The author has everything backwards. We have a new volcanic eruption in Iceland,The volcano melted the glacier above it. Fire melts ice. Ice doesn't melt fire. Volcanos change weather and climate patterns. Weather doesn't change volcanos. The most powerful Icelandic volcanos actually contributed to previous periods of much cooler weather in Europe. If the Katla volcano erupts during the next two years, it will cause a cooling of the weather over Europe.
Man may cause some global warming on the earth. This issue is being widely debated. No serious person has proposed that man is causing volcanos to erupt. Volcanos are acts of nature. Also, the theory of plate tectonics explains how and why volcanos erupt. The tectonic plates on the surface of the earth have been moving around for millions of years, all by themselves.
Richard2: The author has everything backwards. We have a new volcanic
Richard2: "No serious person has proposed that man is causing volcanos to erupt."
Per New Scientist, two years ago:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Melting ice caps may trigger more volcanic eruptions...
Global warming is having a much more profound effect than just melting ice caps - it is melting magma too.
Vatnajökull is the largest ice cap in Iceland, and is disappearing at a rate of 5 cubic kilometres per year.
Carolina Pagli of the University of Leeds, UK, and Freysteinn Sigmundsson of the University of Iceland have calculated the effects of the melting on the crust and magma underneath.
They say that, as the ice disappears, it relieves the pressure exerted on the rocks deep under the ice sheet, increasing the rate at which it melts into magma...
The thinning ice has another effect on volcanoes which will be more widespread.
As the amount of weight on the crust changes, geological stresses inside the crust will also change, increasing the likelihood of eruptions. "...as you melt the ice the crust will bounce up again," explains Bill McGuire of University College London...
McGuire [says] climate change presents an even more explosive threat. "It's not just unloading the crust that triggers volcanic activity but loading as well."
He and his team are looking into the effects that rising sea-levels... will have... "We are going to see a massive increase in volcanic activity globally."
North America is still rebounding since the last ice age, which is why the sea levels have been steadily falling in Alaska and down the Pacific coast to California (see the North American section in http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_4CE_SeaLevel.htm).
Blaming eruptions on relatively small ice sheets such as those in Iceland is ridiculous. See this: http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/RS_Iceland.htm for a look at Iceland's glaciers, volcanoes and climate.
DataAnalysis: North America is still rebounding since the last ice age,
That site, run by a global warming "skeptic" who is a non-climate scientist engineer, literally presents a misleading picture of actual sea level rise on the Pacific Coast. Looking at that presentation one would be mislead into believing that sea levels are dropping from Alaska all the way down to at minimum CA just south of the Oregon border, if not all the way to LA (that misleading presentation omits all points in between).
While sea levels are indeed falling in Alaska, they in fact start to rise in northern Washington State, where they rise and fall until they reach the San Francisco area (if not further north, up to perhaps near the Oregon border) where sea levels are then uniformly rising. Here is a more complete graph, which provides a far more balanced picture (Figure 353.1):
DataAnalysis: "Blaming eruptions on relatively small ice sheets such as those in Iceland is ridiculous. See this: http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/RS_Iceland.htm for a look at Iceland's glaciers, volcanoes and climate."
Given the misleading cherry-picking that "skeptic" site presented with sea levels along the Pacific Coast I would not trust that site to provide a balanced presentation on other subjects.
Publicola: DataAnalysis: "sea levels have been steadily falling in Alaska and
Scientists from several fields of study developed the theory of plate tectonics, which explains how the continents move, how the oceans grow, why volcanos occur where they do, and why earthquakes often occur.
The theory of plate tectonics is well supported by many forms of data, including maps that show the coastlines of South America and Africa match up very well.
If the melting of glaciers is the thing that triggers volcanos, then we should have a risk for volcanos in New York City, which has lost its glacier, and in central Canada, in the northern European nations, and in Yosemite Valley. However, we don't.
Right now, we have a risk of volcanos underneath huge glaciers in Iceland, which haven't melted away over the past 200 years.
Somehow this new theory seems illogical. It has a long way to go to replace plate tectonics as a credible explanation for volcanos and earthquakes.
Richard2: Scientists from several fields of study developed the theory of
No, plate tectonics states that volcanos typically develop near the boundary of two of the earth's tectonic plates, where one plate slides beneath a neighboring plate, or where there is a spreading boundary between two tectonic plates, such as the mid-Atlantic ridge, of which Iceland is only a small part. The volcanos occur in Iceland because the plates are moving, they are separating, and new ocean floor, and some dry land in Iceland, are being created.
The melting ice theory doesn't explain how a volcano develops in a particular location in the first place. That is why it is such a weak theory, compared to plate tectonics. It also doesn't explain the existence of tropical volcanos.
Next thing we know, someone will propose that earthquakes in California are caused by global warming, not by the San Andreas Fault, where one tectonic plate slides north past a neighboring one.
Richard2: No, plate tectonics states that volcanos typically develop near the
Me: "Um, you do understand that for anything to trigger volcanoes in a given geographic locale a volcano has to actually be there... don't you?"
Richard2: "No..."
Um, so you DON"T understand that for anything to trigger volcanoes in a given geographic locale a volcano has to actually be there?
If so, this explains a lot.
Richard2: "The melting ice theory doesn't explain how a volcano develops in a particular location in the first place."
The melting ice theory doesn't explain how babies are made either; fortunately for the theory neither explanation is necessary with respect to its validity.
Publicola: Me: "Um, you do understand that for anything to trigger
Richard, as our friend Publicola says, a volcano has to be there first and therefore New York City is in no danger of an eruption. The fact you do not understand this concept is a little scary.
realpolitic: Richard, as our friend Publicola says, a volcano has to
One may suspect that the best way to achieve climate chaos is to have scientists interfere with a little geo-engineering. We must hope that all sane individuals fight the idea into its well deserved demise.
SFTor: One may suspect that the best way to achieve climate
Hmmm, ice density around 910 kg/m, reference Earth crustal density 2690 kg/m, but 3300 is more often cited for continental (such as Antarctic). Presumably the author is ignoring the largish portions of the northern ice caps floating on water. That leaves Greenland and the Antarctic.
There was a suggestive story floated 15Dec2007 "Volcano Deep Down Could be Melting Greenland's Ice". By 2008 and into 2009, deniers (of greenish tint) were countering "Scientists are actually not sure if there are any volcanoes in Greenland". Slightly idiotic, since geothermal heat can melt ice, without rising to the level of being called a volcano. The nearby example of Iceland is suggestive.
At the other ice cap, 20May2004 science column at msnbc.com noted the presence of an underwater volcano in the Antarctic Sound.. 20Jan2008 NYTimes article "Antarctic volcanoes identified as a possible culprit in glacier melting."..
Nanoo_Visotor: Hmmm, ice density around 910 kg/m, reference Earth crustal density
Whatever happens it's always Climate Change. More rain, it's the Carbon, more droughts, it's the Carbon, more Volcanoes, it's the Carbon, more Hurricanes, it's Carbon, less Hurricanes, it's the Carbon emissions!
LeftHandRightBrain: Whatever happens it's always Climate Change. More rain, it's the
Actually it's the exact opposite. Climate Change is a blank term used to point the finger at many complex issues. Instead of saying all Earth's problems are caused by Carbon Emissions, I advocate isolating the real problems, like dumping toxic waste in the oceans, releasing GMO foods in the biosphere, river water quality and deforestation. Calling everything Climate change is simplicity, not complexity!
LeftHandRightBrain: Actually it's the exact opposite. Climate Change is a blank
It is amazing, the cycles that drive our planet. The volcanos can attempt to cool us back down I suppose and then become dormant when the glaciers wax again (in our lifetimes? sadly -no) and on it goes. A positive feedback loop :-)
Just think, Maine may be the only coastal state in the US to not lose costal land to the rising seas. Both events caused by global warming and glacial melt.
The overall trend in arctic ice volume has been rapidly decreasing for decades:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrent.png
Global mean temperature and sunspot production for instance have a strong correlation http://capnbob.us/blog/2006/08/26/correlating-sunspots-to-global-climate/
but little evidence to support cause-effect
http://en.mercopress.com/2010/04/15/lower-sunspot-activity-anticipates-chillier-winters-for-northern-europe
Sunspot records are our longest and most continuous with high confidence of their accuracy. Temperature records are comparatively skant, incomplete and anecdotal inspiring little confidence. The question of "Whose adjusted temperature numbers did you use?" comes to play during comparison.
Other sunspot-initiated correlations are suggested http://www.canetalk.com/2010/01/1264172027_1263844349.shtml
Over the past two decades the number of sunspots have remained roughly constant while the earth has continued to warm. More importantly, sunspots are merely a proxy for solar radiation activity - and direct measurements have demonstrate the solar radiation trend has remained roughly constant (in fact there's been a slight decrease) since the 1960s, thus ruling out changes in solar radiation as a primary explanation for current global warming.
SwampeastMike: "Sunspot records are our longest and most continuous with high confidence of their accuracy."
Not even close to correct. Anecdotal sunspot records go back a few millennia while for example non-anectdotal ice core records go back hundreds of thousands of years.
SwampeastMike: "Temperature records are comparatively skant, incomplete and anecdotal"
As with direct observations of temperature, until the 19th century sunspot records too were "incomplete and anecdotal." Compared with proxy temperature records like ice core records, historical sunspot records are *very* incomplete and very anecdotal - no contest.
In any event and again, direct and comprehensive solar data demonstrate that solar radiation cannot explain current global warming.
Nice, specific reply. We ignore the ice core and geological records at our own peril. I'm no expert but I'm learnin'. Let's hope that the rest of the public is as well.
According to a 2004 NASA study, "The Armagh Observatory temperature record is one of the longest available for study. A prominent feature of long-term temperature studies has been a general warming since the 1880s. Because both sunspot number and the aa-geomagnetic index have shown similar secular increases, a strong association between trends in global temperature on Earth and trends in the solar/geomagnetic cycle should be apparent." http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/papers/wilsorm/WilsonHathaway2006c.pdf
and from 2004, http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041025/full/news041025-15.html
Publicola "sunspots are merely a proxy for solar radiation"
No. Around 1852 four astronomers noted that the period of the sunspot cycle was identical to the period of changes of geomagnetic activity at Earth, giving birth to the study of Sun-Earth connections we now call "space weather". http://windows2universe.org/sun/activity/sunspot_history.html
Thank you for your addition to the Socratic dialogue with such good humour! Regardless of whether global warming is anthropogenic or otherwise, there are mechanisms that the Earth uses to cool itself automatically. This, in specific, is what we ought not to discount.
Best wishes
DK
Your wording here suggests that you are under the impression that we may now be discounting said natural cooling. If that interpretation is correct, why are you under that impression?
Like Pulicola, I also have some questions about what you are getting at.
Part 1:
I applaud your efforts to introduce ever more complex questions into the climate change debate, because if there is one thing that we can say with absolute certainty, it's that Gaia is a super complex beast and that our computer models, however complex, are but pale approximations of reality, colored by inadequate assumptions. We know that we are likely to anthropogenically tip over the apple cart, but where the apples will fall and their effects are probably well beyond our models.
"Global Warming" was the biggest descriptive naming blunder of the 20th century. This isn't a denier statement, in fact, just the opposite. It's been anthropogenic "Climate Change," from the git-go. The initial anthroponegic symtoms are a warming of the planet which would have happened eventually on its own consonant with the roughly 100,000 year glacial cycles that we can identify over the last near million years, as ice core and geological research make clear. By tipping the climate over millenia ahead of its natural time, I have to wonder if the effect is liable to be the premature onset of the next ice age. This has happened every time that we can look back into the past with any certainty? Today's climatologists focus almost exclusively on man made global warming fed by greenhouse gases, warming which has developed without man in the past, albeit considerably more slowly.
----------------------------------------------------------
Ice cap thaw may awaken Icelandic volcanoes
OSLO (Reuters) - A thaw of Iceland's ice caps in coming decades caused by climate change may trigger more volcanic eruptions by removing a vast weight and freeing magma from deep below ground, scientists said on Friday...
"Our work suggests that eventually there will be either somewhat larger eruptions or more frequent eruptions in Iceland in coming decades," said Freysteinn Sigmundsson, a vulcanologist at the University of Iceland...
Carolina Pagli, a geophysicist at the University of Leeds in England, said there were risks that climate change could also trigger volcanic eruptions or earthquakes in places such as Mount Erebus in Antarctica, the Aleutian islands of Alaska or Patagonia in South America....
She and Sigmundsson wrote a 2008 paper in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters about possible links between global warming and Icelandic volcanoes.
That report said that about 10 percent of Iceland's biggest ice cap, Vatnajokull, has melted since 1890 and the land nearby was rising about 25 millimetres (0.98 inch) a year, bringing shifts in geological stresses.
They estimated that the thaw had led to the formation of 1.4 cubic km (0.3 cubic mile) of magma deep below ground over the past century...
Sigmundsson [said] melting ice seemed the main way in which climate change, blamed mainly on use of fossil fuels, could have knock-on effects on geology.
---
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63E3Y220100416
Now the question is, why have the Cascades been so quiet? For the last hundred years, there's only been a pip at Mt. Baker in 1975, the eruptions at Mt. St. Helens since 1980, and Mt. Lassen in the 1910s. IN the previous century, every single volcano went off.
Man may cause some global warming on the earth. This issue is being widely debated. No serious person has proposed that man is causing volcanos to erupt. Volcanos are acts of nature. Also, the theory of plate tectonics explains how and why volcanos erupt. The tectonic plates on the surface of the earth have been moving around for millions of years, all by themselves.
Per New Scientist, two years ago:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Melting ice caps may trigger more volcanic eruptions...
Global warming is having a much more profound effect than just melting ice caps - it is melting magma too.
Vatnajökull is the largest ice cap in Iceland, and is disappearing at a rate of 5 cubic kilometres per year.
Carolina Pagli of the University of Leeds, UK, and Freysteinn Sigmundsson of the University of Iceland have calculated the effects of the melting on the crust and magma underneath.
They say that, as the ice disappears, it relieves the pressure exerted on the rocks deep under the ice sheet, increasing the rate at which it melts into magma...
The thinning ice has another effect on volcanoes which will be more widespread.
As the amount of weight on the crust changes, geological stresses inside the crust will also change, increasing the likelihood of eruptions. "...as you melt the ice the crust will bounce up again," explains Bill McGuire of University College London...
McGuire [says] climate change presents an even more explosive threat. "It's not just unloading the crust that triggers volcanic activity but loading as well."
He and his team are looking into the effects that rising sea-levels... will have... "We are going to see a massive increase in volcanic activity globally."
---
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13583-melting-ice-caps-may-trigger-more-volcanic-eruptions.html
Blaming eruptions on relatively small ice sheets such as those in Iceland is ridiculous. See this: http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/RS_Iceland.htm for a look at Iceland's glaciers, volcanoes and climate.
Incorrect.
DataAnalysis: " (see the North American section in http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_4CE_SeaLevel.htm)."
That site, run by a global warming "skeptic" who is a non-climate scientist engineer, literally presents a misleading picture of actual sea level rise on the Pacific Coast. Looking at that presentation one would be mislead into believing that sea levels are dropping from Alaska all the way down to at minimum CA just south of the Oregon border, if not all the way to LA (that misleading presentation omits all points in between).
While sea levels are indeed falling in Alaska, they in fact start to rise in northern Washington State, where they rise and fall until they reach the San Francisco area (if not further north, up to perhaps near the Oregon border) where sea levels are then uniformly rising. Here is a more complete graph, which provides a far more balanced picture (Figure 353.1):
http://oaspub.epa.gov/eims/eimscomm.getfile?p_download_id=446967
DataAnalysis: "Blaming eruptions on relatively small ice sheets such as those in Iceland is ridiculous. See this: http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/RS_Iceland.htm for a look at Iceland's glaciers, volcanoes and climate."
Given the misleading cherry-picking that "skeptic" site presented with sea levels along the Pacific Coast I would not trust that site to provide a balanced presentation on other subjects.
The theory of plate tectonics is well supported by many forms of data, including maps that show the coastlines of South America and Africa match up very well.
If the melting of glaciers is the thing that triggers volcanos, then we should have a risk for volcanos in New York City, which has lost its glacier, and in central Canada, in the northern European nations, and in Yosemite Valley. However, we don't.
Right now, we have a risk of volcanos underneath huge glaciers in Iceland, which haven't melted away over the past 200 years.
Somehow this new theory seems illogical. It has a long way to go to replace plate tectonics as a credible explanation for volcanos and earthquakes.
Um, you do understand that for anything to trigger volcanoes in a given geographic locale a volcano has to actually be there... don't you?
The melting ice theory doesn't explain how a volcano develops in a particular location in the first place. That is why it is such a weak theory, compared to plate tectonics. It also doesn't explain the existence of tropical volcanos.
Next thing we know, someone will propose that earthquakes in California are caused by global warming, not by the San Andreas Fault, where one tectonic plate slides north past a neighboring one.
Richard2: "No..."
Um, so you DON"T understand that for anything to trigger volcanoes in a given geographic locale a volcano has to actually be there?
If so, this explains a lot.
Richard2: "The melting ice theory doesn't explain how a volcano develops in a particular location in the first place."
The melting ice theory doesn't explain how babies are made either; fortunately for the theory neither explanation is necessary with respect to its validity.
There was a suggestive story floated 15Dec2007 "Volcano Deep Down Could be Melting Greenland's Ice". By 2008 and into 2009, deniers (of greenish tint) were countering "Scientists are actually not sure if there are any volcanoes in Greenland". Slightly idiotic, since geothermal heat can melt ice, without rising to the level of being called a volcano. The nearby example of Iceland is suggestive.
At the other ice cap, 20May2004 science column at msnbc.com noted the presence of an underwater volcano in the Antarctic Sound.. 20Jan2008 NYTimes article "Antarctic volcanoes identified as a possible culprit in glacier melting."..