Arctic Ice: Startling Find Underseas, Volcanos

As reported in the June 26 edition of ScienceDaily, a research team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) has uncovered evidence of massive undersea volcanic eruptions deep beneath the ice-covered surface of the Arctic Ocean. "Explosive volatile discharge has clearly been a widespread, and ongoing, process," according to the WHOI team...Their first glimpse of the ocean floor 13,000 feet beneath the Arctic ice through visual and sonar images showed an ocean valet filled with flat-topped volcanoes over a mile wide and hundreds of feet high that remain active...Robert Sohn, WHOI geophysicist, chief scientist of the July 27, 2007, Arctic Gakkel Vents Expedition, estimates that exploding mixtures of lava and gas were expelled at speeds of more than 500 meters a second...Is it possible that these eruptions, part of an "ongoing process," have played a part in whatever melting there has been of the Greenland and Arctic ice sheets? Scientists at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory have put together a chart showing Arctic ice relatively stable until a precipitous decline began in 1999 — the very year the Arctic eruptions started....Are Volcanos Melting Arctic? Investors Business Daily 6/30/08

This very interesting finding, not surprisingly, was not included in the hysteria about the decline of Arctic ice to almost nothing. Nor was the following, even more important observation:

Icebergs breaking away and polar bears supposedly drowning are good theater, but they do not reflect reality. In April, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) published a study, based on last September's data, showing Arctic ice has shrunk from 13 million square kilometers to just 3 million...What the WWF didn't mention was that by March of this year the Arctic ice had recovered to 14 million square kilometers and that ice-cover around the Bering Strait and Alaska was at its highest level ever recorded. Ice freezes. Ice melts. That's what ice does...At the other end of Earth, we're told the Larsen B ice shelf on the western side of Antarctica is collapsing. That part is warming and has been for decades. But it comprises just 2% of the continent. The rest is cooling....(Are Volcanos...cont'd, IBD)

Precisely what Michael Crichton illustrated in State of Fear and discusses often on his Web site. Global warming based on manmade activity is a political hoax. Nature moves on regardless.

Luther