Is Global Warming Causing Volcanos?

I am anticipating Al Gore's next tactic. Now that there is a Direct Correlation between the melting of the arctic cap and the volcano activity found under the oceans.

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.

That leaves former Vice President Gore only one choice, I am sure he will soon announce that Global Warming Causes volcanoes:

Are Volcanoes Melting Arctic? By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY |

Climate Change: While the media scream that man-made global warming is making the North Pole ice-free, another possible cause is as old as the Earth itself. They just have to look deeper

To the delight of Al Gore and the rest of the Gaia groupies, scientists at the National Snow & Ice Data Center in Colorado are predicting that the North Pole will be completely free of ice this summer. The apocalyptic headlines already are starting to appear.

"From the viewpoint of science, the North Pole is just another point on the globe, but symbolically it is hugely important," says the center's Mark Serreze. "There is supposed to be ice at the North Pole, not open water."

From a media standpoint, this is another sign of the apocalypse — proof positive of man-made climate change. But we've heard this before.

In August 2000 the New York Times ran a piece claiming the pole was free of ice for the first time in 50 million years, long before SUVs roamed Earth. As earth scientist Patrick Michaels noted, "It was retracted three weeks later as a barrage of scientists protested that open water is common at or near the pole at the end of summer."

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.

The WHOI researchers found that evidence of a series of strong quakes and eruptions as big as the one that buried the ancient city of Pompeii took place in 1999 along the Gakkel Ridge, an underwater mountain range snaking 1,100 miles from the northern tip of Greenland to Siberia.

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. They're not like Mount St. Helens or Krakatoa, but more like the less bombastic, oozing Kilauea variety that slowly built the Hawaiian Islands.

Robert Sohn, WHOI geophysicist, lead author and 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.

Sohn says the large volumes of CO2 gas that belched out of the undersea volcanoes likely contributed to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Is it possible that it 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.

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.

At the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, hosted by the Heartland Institute, keynote speaker Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute and the University of Virginia debunked claims of "unprecedented" melting of Arctic ice. He showed how Arctic temperatures were warmer during the 1930s and the vast majority of Antarctica is indeed cooling.

Earth is not a museum, but a geologically active place that reminds us frequently how relatively puny our activities are. The WHOI's voyage to the bottom of the sea shows it is climate alarmists who are skating on thin ice.