Submitted by Ben Smith on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 14:07

Hello John, Merry Christmas Eve to you and your research team. Thank you for your note. My question last night was attempting to ask if Dr. Kyle's Mount Erebus research has seen a seasonal increase in icequake-generated seismic activity picked up on the seismographs. My understanding is that icequake seismograph signals differ from volcanotectonic-generated seismic events (with a given point of "overlap" or connection in significantly large volcanotectonic events moving "very large chunks of ice"). John, I can picture your students and students all over the globe thinking about this same question: -With a bit of global warming (and pronounced Polar warming relative to lower latitudes), it seems that an upward trend in melting and therefore glacial movement/icequake activity on Ross Island and elsewhere on the Antarctic continent might be taking place and be detectable.

John, Thank You for sharing your Mount Erebus PolarTREC experience! Merry Christmas and Peace. Ben Smith Environmental Science teacher Peninsula High School California

John Wood

Merry Christmas Ben,
You are right, these are interesting and important topics for us all. In general there is growing icequake activity in the western ice sheet of the antarctic. There has even been activity detected and recorded on Ross Island. Specifically we have been collecting seismic data on the volcano from both passive and active sources. It would not surprise anyone here if some icequake measurments appear in the records, as background noise. However, it will be the better part of the next year or more before our data is gone through and "crunched" enough to observe this. I'm sorry not be more direct at this time, but the concepts that you are talking about are not in our direct attention at this time. The connections may turn out to be strong ones, but at this time we have no data. I can suggest a direction for you. If you have not already looked at this, Richard Aster from New Mexico Tech has liturature out relating to your topic. "Singing Icebergs" is the main title of one paper. You may even contact him at Tech. Let me know.
Here is one link I found: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/1129_051129_iceberg_sing... 
Thanks for the questions. Enjoy your holidays!
Cheers,
John