Ash Backward

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Science: An Icelandic scientist says climate change spurs volcanic eruptions such as the one disrupting air traffic in Europe. Rather, the evidence suggests volcanoes cause global cooling and Arctic ice to melt.

The stunning eruption of a volcano under Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull glacier has disrupted air traffic over the continent of Europe as vast plumes of steam and ash were spewed into the atmosphere. Once again, we witness the power of nature over man even as man blames himself for nature's acts.

Almost every malady on earth has been blamed on global warming, so it wasn't all that surprising when Freysteinn Sigmundsson, a volcanologist at the University of Iceland, and Carolina Pagli, a geophysicist at the University of Leeds, blamed the Icelandic eruption on man-made climate change.

Their theory is that global warming has been melting the glacier on top of the volcano, about 650 feet thick, which has served as a cap keeping the volcano quiet. As the ice has melted, the cap has weakened, removing a vast weight and freeing magma that has been building up inside the earth.

"Global warming melts ice, and this can influence magmatic systems," Sigmundsson says. Pagli warns that climate change could also trigger volcanic eruptions and even earthquakes in places such as Mount Erebus in Antarctica, the Aleutian islands in Alaska, or Patagonia in South America. She and Dr. Sigmundsson wrote a 2008 paper in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters about possible links between global warming and Icelandic volcanoes.

Is global warming melting ice-plugging volcanic craters, allowing them to erupt, or is it the volcanoes themselves that are melting the ice above them? Two years ago, we commented on a report in the June 26, 2008, edition of ScienceDaily that a research team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) had uncovered evidence of massive undersea volcanic eruptions deep beneath the ice-covered surface of the Arctic Ocean.

The WHOI researchers found 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.

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.

Nature's influence over climate is massive and predates and dwarfs man's relatively puny influence. From ocean currents to solar cycles, the earth's temperature is influenced by natural and cyclical phenomena over which man has no control.

The irony here is that while global warming is blamed for the current eruption, gases from past volcanoes have actually lowered the earth's temperatures, caused acid rain and even thinned our protective ozone layer. This eruption may as well, if it persists. This volcano erupted in December 1821 (long before the SUV) and that lasted more than a year.

Sulfur from volcanoes reacts with water in the air to form sulfuric acid droplets that reflect sunlight hitting the earth. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines is known to have cooled the planet by 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit.

In 1783, a poison cloud from Iceland's Laki volcano killed thousands of people across Europe and spewed an estimated 120 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the air. That amount is three times Europe's industrial output in 2006.

In 1815, the Tambora eruption in Indonesia killed an estimated 92,000 people, and its ashes reached Europe, blanketing the continent and turning 1816 into the famous "year without a summer." And let's not forget the Krakatoa eruption in 1883 or our own Mount St. Helens in 1980.

As the environmentalists' earth goddess Gaia throws a hissy fit in Iceland, Congress considers passing cap-and-trade legislation to control emissions and the EPA moves to regulate carbon dioxide, as if they'd have any meaningful impact on climate. A volcano in Iceland is telling them how the world really works.