Above, the superb PBS “Weathered” series looks at recently released maps of Antarctica beneath the ice sheet, incorporating decades of new data and observation.
One key takeaway: West Antarctica sits astride part of the Pacific “Ring of Fire” volcanic and tectonic chain. Hundreds of volcanoes sit beneath the ice, and paleo records indicate that increased ice loss could have a feedback effect on these mountains.
Result could possibly mean greater sensitivity to deglaciation than was previously thought. This is consistent with the results of research across a multitude of fields from geology to biology.
Meanwhile, a new Hulu series has an Antarctic Super-Eruption as its takeoff point. Looks cool.
I’ve been asking for a while now ‘what happens when we move (displace) the weight of the water in the glacial ice from the mountain-tops to the seafloor?’
Of course the answer is never the answer, what’s really interesting is the mystery: was as has been suggested Gilgamesh’s (and Noah’s badly plagiarized) flood and the fall of ‘Atlantis’ the result of volcanic activity rapidly melting one of the Antarctic ice-sheets? A massive tsunami there is some slight evidence elsewhere for sometime at the start of the end of the last ice-age, between eight and ten thousand years ago?
Interesting how accurate the Piri Reis map is …
Geologists are more than familiar with “isostatic rebound” (usually “glacial rebound”) of the crust. Norway, for example, is still rising from the loss of ice in our current interglacial period; sea level* along its coast has been going down since the last glacial maximum ~20,000 years ago. They’ve even measured some crustal rebound in the Central Valley of California from the mass of water that has been extracted from those aquifers just in the last hundred years.
A cross-section of crustal plates (riding along the earths aesthenosphere) would show the crust bulging into the aesthenosphere proportional to the weight on top, hence the crust under Himalayas would be down deeper than, say, the smaller Rocky Mountains. While mountaintop glaciers are fairly massive, they are still a small percent of the total mass of the mountains (as measured from the mountain peak to where its mass pushes into the asthenosphere).
The issue here is the magma chambers within the crust, especially shallow ones, can be very sensitive to overburden pressure. From the description in the video, the collapse of Antarctic calderas could result in some sort of mix of Yellowstone (most famous caldera) and the flash steam (phreatic) eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption in 2022.
After that there will be a lot of rapid melting, including potentially building up giant meltwater lakes that would collapse sporadically. (Lake Missoula was estimated volume 500 cubic miles—about half the volume of Lake Michigan—and we can see what kind of energy that released.)
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*All sea level is local.
But a few examples. I ask these questions so others may answer, because nobody listens to me
In the video’s map of Antarctica beneath the ice, there are some parallel lines that are the result of stitching together multiple passes of the scanning data. Look forward to them being attributed instead to some “chariots of the gods” type prehistoric alien visitation or something equally ridiculous.