
New study surfaces explosive risk hidden beneath Antarctic ice
The melting of glaciers and ice caps by the climate crisis could unleash a barrage of explosive volcanic eruptions, a study suggests.
The loss of ice releases the pressure on underground magma chambers and makes eruptions more likely. This process has been seen in Iceland, an unusual island that sits on a mid-ocean tectonic plate boundary. But the research in Chile is one of the first studies to show a surge in volcanism on a continent in the past, after the last ice age ended.
Global heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels is now melting ice caps and glaciers across the world. The biggest risk of a resurgence of volcanic eruptions is in west Antarctica, the researchers said, where at least 100 volcanoes lie under the thick ice. This ice is very likely to be lost in the coming decades and centuries as the world warms.
Volcanic eruptions can cool the planet temporarily by shooting sunlight-reflecting particles into the atmosphere. However, sustained eruptions would pump significant greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide and methane. This would further heat the planet and potentially create a vicious circle, in which rising temperatures melt ice that leads to further eruptions and more global heating.
Pablo Moreno-Yaeger, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, who led the research, said: 'As glaciers retreat due to climate change, our findings suggest these volcanoes go on to erupt more frequently and more explosively.'
The research, which was presented at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Prague, and is in the final stages of review with an academic journal, involved camping high in the Andes, among active and dormant volcanoes.
As ice caps and glaciers melt, the pressure they put on volcanoes is released — and the magma that has built up beneath them is more likely to erupt, leading to a vicious circle of heating.
Detailed work on one volcano, called Mocho-Choshuenco, used radioisotope dating to estimate the age of volcanic rocks produced before, during and after the last ice age, when the 1,500-metre-thick Patagonian ice sheet covered the area. Analysis of the minerals in the rocks also revealed the depth and temperature at which the rocks formed.
This data revealed that thick ice cover had suppressed the volume of eruptions between 26,000 and 18,000 years ago, allowing a large reservoir of magma to build up 10-15km (6.2-9.3 miles) below the surface. After the ice melted, from about 13,000 years ago, the pressure on the magma chamber was released, gasses in the liquid or molten rock expanded and explosive eruptions followed.
'We found that following deglaciation, the volcano starts to erupt way more, and also changes composition,' said Moreno-Yaeger. The composition changed as the magma melted crustal rocks while eruptions were suppressed. This made the molten rock more viscous and more explosive on eruption.
'Our study suggests this phenomenon isn't limited to Iceland, where increased volcanicity has been observed, but could also occur in Antarctica,' he said. 'Other continental regions, like parts of North America, New Zealand and Russia, also now warrant closer scientific attention.'
Previous research has shown volcanic activity increased globally by two to six times after the last ice age, but the Chilean study was one of the first to show how this happened. A similar phenomenon was reported via the analysis of rocks in eastern California in 2004.
A recent review by scientists found there had been relatively little study on how the climate crisis had been affecting volcanic activity. They said more research was 'critically important' in order to be better prepared for the damage caused by volcanic eruptions to people and their livelihoods and for possible climate-volcano feedback loops that could amplify the climate crisis. For example, more extreme rainfall is also expected to increase violent explosive eruptions.
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National Observer
20 hours ago
- National Observer
AI observers hit the high seas
This story was originally published by bioGraphic and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration Accurately monitoring a fishery — knowing how many and which fish species are being caught, and what misfortunate creatures are being dragged in as bycatch along the way — has never been easy. Around the world, the job of keeping tabs on fishers has typically fallen to people called fisheries observers who temporarily join a fishing crew to watch and record. There to take scientific observations and report any rule breaking, these independent monitors often have a difficult and dangerous job. Harassment and unsafe working conditions are common, and violence can be rife. Every year since 2009, at least one fisheries observer has gone missing at sea. In other words, relying on onboard human observers is a notoriously imperfect way to regulate fishing activity. Slightly easier and cheaper, and decidedly much safer, is fitting fishing vessels with cameras that record their catches. But even video review is costly and time-consuming. A single fishing trip can generate hundreds of hours of video footage that someone still has to comb through to identify and count the animals flying past the camera. For small-scale fishers, like those involving Indigenous communities on the west coast of Canada, video monitoring and review can be even more of a burden. Though monitoring is essential for managing fish stocks, the Canadian government's fisheries monitoring system was designed with large, commercial, single-species fishers in mind, says Lauren Dean, a communications specialist for the Ha'oom Fisheries Society, an Indigenous organization representing five First Nations near Tofino, British Columbia. Unlike regular commercial fishers, however, Ha'oom's fishers often embark on relatively modest expeditions targeting several species at once. In the Canadian government's view, each species targeted counts as a different commercial with its own legal monitoring requirements. 'Dealing with five or six different systems for monitoring is simply not viable economically,' Dean says. In recent years, though, a solution has emerged to make fisheries monitoring more accessible, more efficient and safer: artificial intelligence. As machine learning, image recognition and other forms of artificial intelligence grow ever more potent, a startup based in Vancouver and called OnDeck AI is developing a computerized fisheries monitoring system that could radically change the video review process for Ha'oom's fishers and others. Though the system is still in the design and testing stages, OnDeck AI hopes to one day be able to automatically detect and count fish in video footage, streamlining the monitoring process. It has big implications for everything from fisheries management and conservation to Indigenous nations' access to data about their waters and resources. Relying on onboard human observers is a notoriously imperfect way to regulate fishing activity, which is why some are trying to develop artificial intelligence that can aid in the completion of the task — or do it without the need for humans. OnDeck AI is the brainchild of Alexander Dungate, who grew up recreationally catching prawns, crab and sole with his family on the BC coast. In 2021, while studying computer science and biology at the University of British Columbia (UBC), he learned about the world of fisheries monitoring — including the hazardous, sometimes lethal situations faced by independent monitors. He also learned that the archive of fisheries catch footage that has already been amassed is so massive that fully analyzing all of it is nearly impossible. Across the border in the United States, for instance, the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, which helps regulate fisheries in California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska, has a year-and-a-half worth of video piled up awaiting review. Dungate reached out to friend and fellow UBC student Sepand Dyanatkar, who was studying machine learning, a branch of AI that focuses on developing algorithms that can learn to analyze data without explicit programming. Building on an AI concept called 'master object tracking,' the pair developed a computer program capable of visually identifying an object — in this case a fish — as it moves through a video. Previous efforts to use AI to audit fisheries catch footage have typically run into the same two types of challenges. One is the generalizability problem. Whether it's turbulent weather, bad lighting, waves and spray splashing the camera or the boat itself getting tossed around in a storm, the qualities of videos captured at sea are highly variable, making analysis difficult. Problem two is the data problem. It takes a significant amount of time and effort to annotate the images and videos needed to train an AI model to pick an individual fish out of an endless barrage of footage, let alone recognize the species. What's more, training a typical AI system to recognize all the rare species — which are often the most important given their ecological significance — is simply not possible, says Dungate, since there just isn't enough footage to work from. For instance, if a killer whale accidentally gets caught in a fisher's net, 'we really need to be able to recognize that. But there's maybe three photos on Earth of that happening,' Dungate says. OnDeck AI sidesteps those issues by designing their system to bypass the need for labeled training data by giving the model the ability to recognize what it's seeing across any setting, including with footage of varying quality captured by different types of cameras in changing weather. Dungate likens the difference between traditional AI models and OnDeck AI's to the difference between memorizing the answers to a test and using more complex reasoning to figure out the answers. In other words, it's being able to identify a fish based on its coloring, shape, and fin structure — even if the system has never seen it before. That's the long-term objective, at least. But for now, OnDeck AI's model needs more priming. So last summer, the company trained its AI system on Ha'oom's video footage. To do that, Jessica Edwards, a Ha'oom biologist, analyzed catch footage alongside the AI. If the model failed to recognize a particular fish in the video feed, Edwards would draw a box around the overlooked animal to teach the algorithm. The goal, Edwards says, is to get the AI system to do as good a job as a human — or better — but in less time. Even before getting to that point, the AI can help an auditor do their job faster by identifying when a fish appears in the footage, allowing them to skip forward to relevant segments of the video rather than having to go through the whole feed. While OnDeck's AI system still needs more tuning, scientists and engineers elsewhere are also trying to crack the AI fisheries observer problem. Some, like a team in Australia, are developing an AI system capable of distinguishing between 12 different species in video footage. Working with the Australian longline tuna and billfish fishers, their system picks the right species roughly 90 per cent of the time. Bubba Cook, the policy director for Sharks Pacific, a New Zealand-based NGO, believes AI-driven monitoring could dramatically increase how much of the world's oceans are under some sort of surveillance. Only a small fraction of the world's fisheries — roughly two per cent — are currently monitored by observers, meaning the vast majority of fishing activity, including the bycatch of protected species, happens without oversight. Though human observers will still be necessary for things like tissue sampling, 'the reality is,' says Cook, that 'electronic monitoring coupled with AI review is the only way we're going to get the level of observer coverage we need.'


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CTV News
6 days ago
- CTV News
SuperNOVA summer camp: High school students get hands-on experience solving climate problems
High school students in Dalhousie University's SuperNOVA Ocean Climate Innovation Program put their remotely operated vehicles to the test in the Halifax Harbour. Jarman Ley, the program coordinator of SuperNOVA, said 25 students took part in the program focused on ocean technologies, engineering, and artificial intelligence. 'We started this program to get high school students excited and interested in the climate and how the ocean relates to that,' said Ley. 'They all developed programs for their own sensors and then drove them into the harbour to see the difference between historical harbour data and current harbour data.' SuperNOVA Students participating in Dalhousie University's SuperNOVA Ocean Climate Innovation Program put their remotely operated vehicles into the Halifax Harbour Friday, July 25, 2025. (Paul DeWitt/CTV Atlantic) The students are testing for oxygen, solidity, and the acidity of the water, said Ley. 'They are specifically doing dissolved oxygen to see if fish have enough oxygen to breathe. They are doing the solidity because as climate changes or temperature changes you can have saltier waters, which is inhospitable to plants. They are doing the acidity of the water, the oxygen reduction potential, which is essentially how the ocean cleans itself.' Ley said the program teaches skills the students can take into their university careers. 'It's been a really interesting way to take all of the knowledge that we've learned and wrap it into one project that we can test and see the results of,' said student Finnegan Jafmann. SuperNOVA Students participating in Dalhousie University's SuperNOVA Ocean Climate Innovation Program put their remotely operated vehicles into the Halifax Harbour Friday, July 25, 2025. (Paul DeWitt/CTV Atlantic) 'A lot of the people here are probably going to use this as really good experience because we got to go to a lot of places. We got to tour multiple parts of the Dal building and the engineering section, and we got to talk to a lot of people about their projects,' said student Emily Whidden. 'For me, it was a lot of interesting information, but for the people who are planning to go into these fields or even come to Dal, it was probably a really good foot in the door.' From 2023 to date, Dalhousie University said SuperNOVA has reached more than 27,500 youth through this not-for-profit initiative. 'Young people are the lifeblood of the future. So, we really believe if we start to encourage them now, that they'll be that much more advanced when they get to university and potentially study it and develop the next generation of innovation,' said Ley. According to Dalhousie University, SuperNOVA summer camps introduce participants to STEM concepts, careers and mentors through 'fun experiments and innovative hands-on activities.' For more Nova Scotia news, visit our dedicated provincial page