Reader's View: Under-sea volcanoes contributing to climate change

The Feb. 16 letter, “ Stop kicking climate change down the road ,” stated, “Volcanoes on land and under the sea release about 200 million tons of carbon dioxide annually.” That was as of 2007.

However, in April 2023, Science reported that high-resolution satellites had recently found more than 19,000 new under-sea volcanoes, bringing the total to over 43,000, of which only about 16,000 have been charted by ship and submarine sonar. So, we really don’t have a good handle on total carbon dioxide pumped into the ocean. And how do you measure the carbon-dioxide tonnage coming off of the tens of thousands of under-sea volcanoes? The letter did not say.

Along with carbon dioxide, these volcanoes and the 40,000-miles of mid-ocean mountain ridges pump enormous amounts of heat into the ocean; we don’t have a good handle on that quantity either. All that hot water is being moved by ocean currents, but all those mountains create vortices that shift water in directions we don’t fully understand — and that can have an enormous effect on global climate.

Global warming is driven by under-sea volcanoes; hot, 40,000-mile-long mid-ocean mountain ridges and rifts, ocean currents, and the amount of sunlight penetrating Earth’s surface.

Man’s puny 0.0016% of the total atmospheric gases is a non-player, as I’ve argued in letters in January and in June 2024 .

Phil Drietz

Delhi, Minnesota