Underwater Volcano Flare-Ups Could Affect Climate Change

Underwater volcanoes are normally gentle giants, but their frequent flare-ups could affect climate change, according to new research.

Triggered by short- and long-term changes in the Earth's orbit and sea levels, these volcanic flare-ups, or pulses, occur on surprisingly regular cycles in between their normal steady states - lasting anywhere from two weeks to 100,000 years.

Scientists have previously suggested that volcanoes on land play a part in climate change, even mitigating its effects due to reflecting aerosols they release into the air during an eruption. One study even says that volcanoes may be behind the infamous global warming "pause," or "hiatus." However, until now little attention has been paid to the vast ranges of volcanoes sitting beneath the ocean surface.

According to this latest study, seafloor volcanoes may help spark natural climate swings.

"People have ignored seafloor volcanoes on the idea that their influence is small - but that's because they are assumed to be in a steady state, which they're not," lead study author Maya Tolstoy, a marine geophysicist at Columbia University, said in a statement. "They respond to both very large forces, and to very small ones, and that tells us that we need to look at them much more closely."

Volcanically active mid-ocean ridges stretch across some 37,000 miles (59,500 kilometers) of the ocean floor. They are the growing edges of giant tectonic plates - as lavas push out, they form new areas of seafloor. Even when they're erupting at a fairly constant rate, undersea volcanoes spew out about eight times more lava annually than land volcanoes, and emit approximately 88 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) a year. (Scroll to read on...)