I guess it is necessary that our earth enter in glacial age to avoid global disaster. The earth freezing will cool down seismic and volcanic activities to be minimum.
What is your opinion?
The deriving forces causing earthquakes and volcanos are mostly internal so, mostly effects of a new glaciation on the seismicity and volcanism are negligible. After all, Iceland is as seismic and volcanic as the other less glacial parts of the MORs.
Dear Towe,
Dr Daniel Herwartz from the University of Cologne, noted that first snowball taken place 2.4 million years ago, the sun was not as strong as it is today.
But a second snowball-like even 600 to 700 million years ago, which wasn’t quite as severe, occurred when the sun was almost as strong as it is today. So I think it might happen again but needs long time.
Since ice is white, so a lot of the incoming sunlight is reflected back to space, and this process leads to increased glaciation period. In this case earth needs another processes to make breaking or turning point back to normal earth as we know now.
These processes might be volcanic and seismic activities. It appears that volcanic activity was ultimately responsible for helping Earth breaking free of its icy grip, though, increasing global temperatures.
We conclude that seismic and volcanic activity was not taken place during glacial age (snowball-like).
Jull, M., & McKenzie, D. (1996). The effect of deglaciation on mantle melting beneath Iceland. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 101(B10), 21815-21828.
Dear Towe,
I agree that no glacial age is going to freeze our earth on the horizon. My question is an assumption to know the whether freezing can lead to reduction of earthquake and volcanic activities.
Volcanic activity and earthquakes are going to be completely uninfluenced by presence or absence of large ice caps, other than the normal ice loading and unloading effects on local earthquakes in the continental crust (if this is the case) under the ice caps.