Are undersea volcanoes responsible for the decline in the Arctic sea ice?
A recent study discovered active volcanoes on the floor of the Arctic Ocean, and some people have wondered if they are causing sea ice to melt. While volcanic eruptions surely warmed the ocean in the immediate vicinity of the eruptions, the amount of heat they produced compared to the large volume of the Arctic Ocean is small. The Arctic Ocean covers 14 million square kilometers (5.4 million square miles), about 1 ½ times the size of the United States or 58 times the size of the United Kingdom. The Arctic Ocean is 4,000 to 5,500 meters (13,000 to 18,000 feet) deep. The heat from the volcanoes would have dispersed over an enormous volume and had little effect on ocean temperature, much as a bucket of boiling water emptied into a lake would have little effect on the lake’s temperature. Finally, the eruptions would have introduced heat at the very bottom of the Arctic Ocean, thousands of feet below the sea ice floating above it. Little if any volcanic heat would have reached the underside
