"There is additional evidence a mantle plume, basically a geothermal heat source such as a volcano, is below Antarctica's Marie Byrd Land and it explains a substantial amount of the melting that creates lakes and rivers under the ice sheet.
...The discovery may help explain why the ice sheet collapsed rapidly in an earlier era of rapid climate change, and why it is so unstable today.
Antarctica's bedrock is laced with rivers and lakes, the largest of which is the size of Lake Erie...
Depiction of flowing water under the Antarctic ice sheet. Blue dots indicate lakes, lines show rivers. Marie Byrd Land is part of the bulging "elbow" leading to the Antarctic Peninsula, left center. Credit: NSF/Zina Deretsky
...At the end of the last ice age around 11,000 years ago, the ice sheet went through a period of rapid, sustained ice loss when changes in global weather patterns and rising sea levels pushed warm water closer to the ice sheet -- just as is happening today.
Such a volcano explains this rapid loss..."
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