Summaryedit

Licensingedit

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following license: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. You are free: to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work to remix – to adapt the work Under the following conditions: attribution – You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). share alike – If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 CC BY-SA 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 truetrue

This image was uploaded as part of European Science Photo Competition 2015.

Quality image This image has been assessed using the Quality image guidelines and is considered a Quality image.

Photo's description:

The Heinabergsjökull in Iceland is an outlet glacier flowing from Vatnajökull, the largest ice cap in in Europe by volume (3,100 km³). All over the world the ongoing retreat of glaciers is one of the clearest manifestations of recent global warming, associated with rising greenhouse gas concentrations. Glaciers in Iceland owe their existence to a maritime climate and they are located in mountainous areas where precipitation is highest. Especially these glaciers are sensitive to climate change and respond rapidly by advancing or retreating. The Vatnajökull has decreased by about 3% in volume in the last 10 years. One of the side effects is the continuous decreasing amount of counter-pressure. As the amount of weight on the Earth’s crust changes, geological stresses inside the crust will also change, the crust will bounce up again, increasing the likelihood of eruptions. But it’s not just unloading the crust that triggers volcanic activity. Another element, the loading part, is the effect that rising sea levels – also a consequence of melting ice caps – will have on volcanoes. Scientists expect that we are going to see a massive increase in volcanic activity globally, with distinctive climate effects. The eruptions of the Eyjafjallajökull in 2010 and the Bardarbunga last year, were the first impressive forerunners.