Where ice and fire coexist, what will be the consequences of the mysterious Antarctic volcanic group erupting again?

Beneath a thick layer of ice, something lurks quietly, waiting to tear apart the hard ice...

This huge snow and ice wasteland sits on top of a volcanic group. Today, in our hypothetical world, these volcanoes are about to wake up.

Will their scorching lava destroy the Earth's surface? Or could a thick layer of Antarctic ice stop lava eruptions? Will it make our planet uninhabitable?

Antarctica, the coldest continent on Earth, hides a ton of secrets, and we never knew it had a huge number of volcanoes buried beneath it. It wasn't until 2013 that scientists accidentally discovered two sets of small earthquakes, and now that we've scanned Antarctica with ice drill radar, we know there are more volcanoes hidden beneath the ice.

138 to be exact, that's just the volcanoes we know so far that are dormant there. How much trouble would we be in if these volcanoes buried under the Antarctic ice sheet suddenly came to life?

Volcanoes in the universe are easy to find, even outside our home planet, Jupiter's moon Io, Saturn's moon Enceladus, and our neighbor Venus have volcanoes.

But now instead of wasting time there, we need to save our own world, you know what happens when a volcano erupts?

These dormant volcanoes often have warning signs, such as earthquakes, before they actually wake up. They indicate lava moving under the surface, then lava and ash join the ranks, along with hot gases, depending on the scene and the type of lava.

On average, when lava moves at 10 kilometers per hour, hot gases can easily escape. But when a major eruption occurs, the volcano releases a mixture of superheated gas and ash. They create a kind of pyroclastic cloud, these things are hot, can reach 700 degrees, can move at 80 kilometers per hour, and if you get trapped in it, it means your doomsday.

But in Antarctica, volcanoes are not at all what we think they are, buried under more than 4 kilometers of ice. In places where we can't handle volcanic gas getting to the surface, in at least one eruption, the heat released melts the ice and creates huge caverns that produce huge amounts of meltwater.

This is when things start to get bad, the newly formed meltwater will cause the ice above to move faster, and the Antarctic ice sheet will start to enter the ocean. The domino effect kicks in, where the weight of the giant ice puts pressure on the volcanoes, keeping them stable, but if the pressure drops, the volcanoes go wild and the magma finds its way out in the eruption.

In Antarctica, for example, multiple volcanic eruptions could awaken more than 100 other volcanoes and destabilize the entire region. As the volcano continues to erupt, more meltwater is produced, causing more Antarctic ice to slide into the ocean, which is surrounded by warm ocean currents.

On the one hand, we will have a new understanding of the Antarctic bedrock that has been hidden under the ice, and on the other hand, the ice will not only disappear on the Antarctic continent, it will also melt.

If all of Antarctica's ice melted, it would raise global sea levels by about 60 meters. Rising sea levels would cause major storms that, although slower moving, would bring more rain, hurricanes and typhoons, which would affect the planet Surfaces wreak havoc, wildlife in coastal areas loses their habitat, and agricultural soils become contaminated with salt.

If all the volcanic eruptions happened in a single day, widespread flooding would push tens of millions of people off shorelines, we would see thousands die, and storms destroy everything floating in the ocean.

But let's go back to Antarctica, now that all the ice has melted, what about the rampant magma?

The good news is that it won't turn the earth into a lava world, after all, volcanoes will erupt underwater, hot magma will solidify in the cold water of the Antarctic ocean, and maybe more continents will be added, like Antarctica itself. bedrock.

But the catastrophe doesn't end there. When volcanoes erupt on land, they spew huge amounts of hot gas, including carbon monoxide, methane, carbon dioxide and nitrogen, along with usually a lot of water vapor mixed in.

Volcanoes are estimated to release 645 million tons of carbon dioxide each year. If volcanic eruptions in Antarctica were strong enough, they could blow away large swathes of ice, releasing more toxic greenhouse gases.

About 18,000 years ago, when one of the volcanoes on Antarctica's surface, Mount Gay, erupted, beautiful chemicals devoured the ozone layer across the southern hemisphere and caused glaciers to melt, with its help, ending Earth's last ice age.

Now imagine more than a hundred volcanoes erupting at the same time, it would be catastrophic for our planet.

But don't worry, the volcanoes in Antarctica don't erupt at the same time, and if they do start to wake up, it will also take decades. Still, when sea levels rise, we should be prepared for everything, even adjusting to how to live underwater.