While ice in most of Antarctica is increasing*—confounding warmists modelling which says it should all be melting away—ice in the West Antarctic has been decreasing. Which is why warmists rely on that melting to say their models are working, and man-made CO2 is making the melting.
Yet all is not as it seems.
Just as the ozone hole occurring every summer over Antarctica was supposed to be caused my man-made CFCs, yet once CFCs were banned it became pretty obvious the primary cause is likely that big old volcano under the hole belching out chlorine, so too it looks likely the reason for the West Antarctica melt is also natural.
Turns out that after “the first detailed look at the Earth beneath this region” there is what reports are calling
a giant blob of superheated rock about 60 miles beneath Mount Sidley, the last of a chain of volcanic mountains in Marie Byrd Land at one end of the transect. More surprisingly, they reveal hot rock beneath the Bentley Subglacial Trench, a deep basin at the other end of the transect.
The Bentley Subglacial Trench is part of the West Antarctic Rift System and hot rock beneath the region indicates that this part of the rift system was active quite recently.
As Jo Nova comments,
The study really highlights how little we know about heat flow in Antarctica.
Don’t expect that ignorance to affect any of the warmists’ mantras, however.
* Last month, “another new study seemed to back up the NASA findings using ice cores to estimate the last three centuries of snowfall along the coast of West Antarctica. ‘Since the record is 300 years long, we can see that the amount of snow that has been accumulating in this region since the 1990s is the highest we have seen in the last 300 years. The 20th century increases look unusual,’ said Elizabeth Thomas, a paleoclimatologist with the British Antarctic Survey and lead author of the new study published in Geophysical Research Letters.
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