Scientists have discovered what they think may be another reason why Greenland 's ice is melting: a thin spot in Earth's crust is enabling underground magma to heat the ice.
They have found at least one "hotspot" in the northeast corner of Greenland -- just below a site where an ice stream was recently discovered.
The researchers don't yet know how warm the hotspot is. But if it is warm enough to melt the ice above it even a little, it could be lubricating the base of the ice sheet and enabling the ice to slide more rapidly out to sea.
"It could be that there's a volcano down there," he said. "But we think it's probably just the way the heat is being distributed by the rock topography at the base of the ice."
"Timothy Leftwich, von Frese's former student and now a postdoctoral engineer at the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at the University of Kansas, presented the study's early results on Thursday, December 13, 2007, at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco."
[url=http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/hotgreen.htm]http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/hotgreen.htm[/url]
