URI Professor finds volcanic heat source under glacier

A University of Rhode Island researcher worked with a team of five other scientists in discovering an active volcanic heat source underneath an Antarctic glacier.

Assistant Professor of Oceanography at URI, Brice Loose helped discover the heat source during a major expedition on the RSS James Clark Ross in 2014.

According to Loose, the team did not travel to Antarctica with the intention of finding a heat source, but rather pathways of ice melting. The team sampled water to measure the presence of noble gases to trace ice-melt to the source. However, the team grew suspicious when they discovered abnormally high amounts of helium-3, which indicated volcanism in the water.

Loose and his team originally dismissed this as questionable data, but previous research suggested that helium in hydrothermal water can show evidence of molten volcano rocks.

“You can imagine it as like a fairly defined interface between rock and ice,” said Loose when he explained how volcanoes under glaciers work. “It’s like the icing on top of a cake; the two aren’t really mixing. The ice is literally frozen on the rock. And the water comes in contact with helium from the volcano, melting more of the ice.”

Despite the findings, Loose said that this does not confirm that the volcano under the glacier is active. He estimates that this volcano has not been active for at least 2,000 years.

The findings are especially important in determining the stability of the West Antarctic ice sheets.

“[The West Antarctic ice sheet] has been identified as a vulnerable ice sheet because of the fact that a lot of the bedrock underneath is below sea level. This means that you literally have a landmass that is almost exclusively made out of ice” said Loose.

However, the heat from the source can still affect Arctic glaciers. “As you move further towards the interior, there’s no coastline to mitigate melting,” said Loose. “There’s basically no shoreline underneath all ice. In the worst case scenario, it could melt the entire artic sheet.”

This does not mean that volcanic heat sources are fully responsible for the rising sea levels caused by melting glaciers. “It’s probably not an immediate concern for accelerating rising sea levels,” said Loose. “When [the data] first came out the response was ‘this is proof that man-made climate change is not true’ but that is not an accurate conclusion. We have concrete evidence that this volcano doesn’t have near the heat the ocean does, and can’t account for all the melting. The bigger concern is if you start to thin the ice if it will become more active.”

When asked if he planned to return to Antarctica to continue research, Loose said that he had no immediate future plans for travel, but saw it as “definitely a topic of discussion.” There have been ideas of drilling to find the exact source of the heat, but doing so would be extremely difficult. For now, he is focused on continuing to work with the data found during the expedition.