Pat Dollard | Young Americans

So Pope Al Gore The Disenfranchised and his Church of Global Warming-Alarmists and Latter Day Climate Change-Ologists keep pushing how the oceans are warming and Polar ice shelves are receding … and it’s ALL mankind’s fault … especially American manunkind.

But then HEY, pay NO attention to actual scientific and geological facts. Nothing to see here, folks. Just put your trust in Al … and buy those piggy-tailed light bulbs and keep buying carbon credits.

(A general view taken in May 2008 shows the Artic Ocean off the coast of Greenland. Recent massive volcanoes have risen from the ocean floor deep under the Arctic ice cap, spewing plumes of fragmented magma into the sea, scientists who filmed the aftermath reported Wednesday.)

Volcanic eruptions reshape Arctic ocean floor: study

Recent massive volcanoes have risen from the ocean floor deep under the Arctic ice cap, spewing plumes of fragmented magma into the sea, scientists who filmed the aftermath reported Wednesday.

The eruptions — as big as the one that buried Pompei — took place in 1999 along the Gakkel Ridge, an underwater mountain chain snaking 1,800 kilometres (1,100 miles) from the northern tip of Greenland to Siberia.

Scientists suspected even at the time that a simultaneous series of earthquakes were linked to these volcanic spasms.

But when a team led of scientists led by Robert Sohn of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts finally got a first-ever glimpse of the ocean floor 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) beneath the Arctic pack ice, they were astonished.

What they saw was unmistakable evidence of explosive eruptions rather than the gradual secretion of lava bubbling up from Earth’s mantle onto the ocean floor.

Previous research had concluded that this kind of so-called pyroclastic eruption could not happen at such depths due to the crushing pressure of the water.

“On land, explosive volcanic eruptions are nothing exceptional, although they present a major threat,” said Vera Schlindwein, a geologist with Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute for Sea and Polar Research, which took part in the study.

But the new findings, published in Nature, showed that “large-scale pyroclastic activity is possible along even the deepest portions of the global mid-ocean ridge volcanic system.”

The mid-ocean ridge runs 84,000 kilometres (52,000 miles) beneath all the world’s major seas except the Southern Ocean, and marks the boundary between many of the tectonic plates that make up the surface of the Earth.

When continental plates collide into each other, they can thrust up mountain ranges such as the Himalayas.

But along most of the mid-ocean ridge — including the Gakkal Ridge — the plates are pulling apart, allowing molten magna and gases trapped beneath the crust to escape.

Sohn and his colleagues gathered their data in July last year aboard the ice breaker Oden, using state-of-the-art instruments including a mutlibeam echo sounder, two autonomous underwater vehicles and a sub-ice camera designed for the mission.

Both sonar and visual images showed an ocean valley filled with flat-topped volcanos up to two kilometres (1.2 miles) wide and several hundred metres high.

The Strata-Sphere asks

One of the disconnects the Church of Al Gore/IPCC has yet to address regarding so-called Global Warming is why is it the Arctic ice extent is receding (thus all the chicken-little screams) while the Antarctic ice extent is growing at historic rates. Given the fact CO2 levels are ubiquitous across the Earth, if this was really a global climate driver we should see higher temperatures (and less ice) across the globe, adjusted for latitude and the amount of land vs sea surface area. Here is the Northern ice extent plots from NOAA

Well it seems we may have an answer to why the Arctic water temperatures were rising and the ice was melting - massive undersea volcanoes.

Folks need to understand that the Arctic Ocean is a fairly closed system because it resides in a large bowl shaped depression with only limited outlets that rise to much shallower depths, as seen in the following picture:

The natural basin that is the Arctic Ocean is possibly the reason why Arctic water temperatures were rising because the warming caused by these massive underwater explosions couldn’t really circulate out of the basin. Is this the real culprit for why the ice and glaciers have been receding in the Arctic and ice as been growing in the Antarctic? Seems highly possible.

Update: In case folks are wondering the Gakkel Ridge is that ridge running through the middle of the basin