From JoNova

By Jo Nova

Don’t panic, but the unleashed fossil spirits from The Ford 150 are about to plague us with volcanoes

If only you bought your oranges locally, instead of flying them in from California, the lava would have behaved.

If ever you have doubts that we are merely 3 genes away* from being mammoth hunting tribes of prophets and bone pointing shamen, look no further than modern captive science. These nice geochemists haven’t even published a paper yet, but five minutes after giving a speech at a conference, it’s already click-bait headlines and advertising for The Blob. Not that the captive researchers seem to mind (more’s the pity).

We are about to enter the doom loop where climate change melts glaciers which trigger volcanoes, which melts more glaciers. The press release even says “explosive time bombs”.

Except, of course, this is really about the Great Ice Sheets melting from the last ice age, not about humans raising global temperatures by a thousandth of a degree. And we’ve known about this since 1992 when Sivaldason et al reported that a kilometer thick block of ice slowed down volcanic eruptions in Iceland during the depths of the ice-cold climate. The new team have just shown this happened in Chile too.

Melting glaciers are awakening Earth’s most dangerous volcanoes

European Association of Geochemistry

Scientists have discovered that melting glaciers could unleash powerful volcanic eruptions by removing the weight that keeps magma trapped deep underground. Antarctica may hold hundreds of these explosive time bombs. Melting glaciers may be silently setting the stage for more explosive and frequent volcanic eruptions in the future, according to research on six volcanoes in the Chilean Andes.

The Guardian goes full Absurdium: “A barrage of explosions”

After the Patagonian ice sheets melted 12,000 years ago, volcanoes increased two to six fold they say…. as if increasing atmospheric CO2 by 0.01% somehow compares to removing a block of ice that was 1.5 to 2 km thick and weighed 540 trillion metric tons:

Melting glaciers and ice caps could unleash wave of volcanic eruptions, study says

The melting of glaciers and ice caps by the climate crisis could unleash a barrage of explosive volcanic eruptions, a study suggests.

“Previous research has shown volcanic activity increased globally by two to six times after the last ice age…”

“A recent review by scientists found there had been relatively little study on how the climate crisis had been affecting volcanic activity. They said more research was “critically important” in order to be better prepared for the damage caused by volcanic eruptions to people and their livelihoods and for possible climate-volcano feedback loops that could amplify the climate crisis. For example, more extreme rainfall is also expected to increase violent explosive eruptions.”

Should we toss darts at Voodoo dolls?

The witchdoctors of modern science are one-variable thinkers, and every answer is “climate change”.

We don’t even know how many volcanoes there are on Earth. Most volcanoes are underwater and a couple of years ago we found another 19,000 of them that the experts didn’t know about. Sometimes we only find new seamounts when we run into them in a nuclear sub, like the USS San Francisco did in 2005.

We also don’t even know when underwater volcanoes erupt today, let alone whether they were more or less active in 21,000BC. It’s hard to believe, but we can see a volcano explode on Io, easier than we can see one in a deep sea trench. Eruptions under two  kilometers of water can be somewhat muted.

The feedback doom loops suggested here are vicarious guesses. Who knows — when the great ice sheets squashed down volcanoes on land, the magma might just have been squeezed out of undersea trenches instead. And underwater eruptions rewrite all the rules. Sudden heating of water might divert ocean currents, it might unleash nutrients that feed vast phytoplankton blooms which in turn emit benzene and toluene aerosols that rise up and increase cloud cover, cooling the world.

*No disrespect intended. There probably weren’t many dumb mammoth hunters in the northern Tundra in an ice age.