Mobile magma under Antarctic ice

摘要

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing mass as the climate warms and the surrounding floating ice shelves that buttress the land-based ice are eaten away at their base by warmer ocean waters~1. However, the ice can also melt from below on land, where subglacial volcanic activity causes a high flow of heat through the crust~(2-5). Writing in Nature Geoscience, Lough et al.~6 use observations of hundreds of small seismic events in the crust beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to infer current magma movement in a volcanic system beneath the ice, which may bring heat up to the rock-ice interface and thus affect ice flow.