Global Warming can have such a drastic effect on our planet it can melt glaciers allowing the earth's crust to rebound when the glacier's weight is removed, and even produce volcanic eruptions in the process. From Time Magazine:
How Climate Change Leads to Volcanoes (Really)
By Jeffrey Kluger
Now, you can add yet another problem to the climate change hit list: volcanoes. That’s the word from a new study conducted in Iceland and accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters. The finding is bad news not just for one comparatively remote part of the world, but for everywhere.
Iceland has always been a natural lab for studying climate change. It may be spared some of the punishment hot, dry places like the American southwest get, but when it comes to glacier melt, few places are hit harder. About 10% of the island nation’s surface area is covered by about 300 different glaciers—and they’re losing an estimated 11 billion tons of ice per year. Not only is that damaging Icelandic habitats and contributing to the global rise in sea levels, it is also—oddly—causing the entire island to rise. And that’s where the trouble begins.
Eleven billion tons of ice weights, well, 11 billion tons; as that weight flows away, the underlying land decompresses a bit. In the new paper, investigators from the University of Arizona and the University of Iceland analyzed data from 62 GPS sensors that have been arrayed around Iceland—some since as long ago as 1995, others only since 2006 or 2009. But all of the sensors told the same story: Iceland is rising—or rebounding as geologists call it—by 1.4 in. (35 mm) per year.
That’s much faster than the investigators expected, and other studies of the Icelandic crust show that the speed began to pick up around 1980, or just the time that glacier melt accelerated, too. “Our research makes the connection between recent accelerated uplift and the accelerated melting of the Icelandic ice caps,” said Kathleen Compton of the University of Arizona, a geoscientist and one of the paper’s co-authors, in a statement.
The problem is, Iceland isn’t just any island, it’s a highly geologically active one, with a lot of suppressed volcanic anger below the surface. The last thing you want to do in a situation like that is take the lid off the pot.
“As the glaciers melt, the pressure on the underlying rocks decreases,” Compton said in an e-mail to TIME. “Rocks at very high temperatures may stay in their solid phase if the pressure is high enough. As you reduce the pressure, you effectively lower the melting temperature.” The result is a softer, more molten subsurface, which increases the amount of eruptive material lying around and makes it easier for more deeply buried magma chambers to escape their confinement and blow the whole mess through the surface.
Icelandic history shows how bad things can get when the ice thins out. During the last deglaciation period 12,000 years ago—one that took much longer to unfold than the current warming phase turbocharged by humans—geologic records suggest that volcanic activity across the island increased as much as 30-fold.
Any increase anywhere near that magnitude would impact Icelandic life, and be very disruptive to trans-Atlantic aviation since volcanic ash is very hazardous to aircraft in flight
Last week while on a trip in western central Mexico I visited city of Colima located at about an elevation of 1,200 feet on the lower flank of Volcan Fuego de Colima. I did a day trip higher on the volcano when it erupted. I got these dramatic photos at an elevation of about 5,000 feet on 1/ 19 /15.
Volcan Fuego is has warm tropical climate where large glaciers melting are not present unlike the conditions in Iceland.
Volcan Fuego de Colima (12,532 ft.) in the foreground is one of the most active volcanos on the planet. In the background is the dormant Volcan Nevado de Colima (14,015 ft.).
Volcan Fuego de Colima just minutes before the eruption.
When the eruption began I hurriedly pulled the rent-a-car over, jumped out of and took these shots.
With the eruption under way you can see ejected material and bolders tumbling down the mountainside.
I could hear the rumble and distant explosions as it erupted.
Watching a volcanic eruption from this close of a vantage point was an extraordinary experience.
A few minutes later with the ash plume reaching up past 20,000 feet. You can see some boulders ejected from the volcano during previous larger more violent eruptions in the foreground.