Glacial cycles and magmatism

Glacial cycles involve the transfer of significant quantities of water between the continents and the oceans. This changes the loading on the magmatic system beneath, both at mid-ocean ridges and terrestrially, such as in Iceland (pictured). Since magmatism transports carbon from the mantle to the ocean/atmosphere system, this could potentially feed back on glacial cycles (Huybers and Langmuir, 2009), potentially resolving the 100,000 year problem of Milankovitch cycles.

• We recently quantitified the effect of sea-level variation on melt and carbon fluxes at mid-ocean ridges (Cerpa, Rees Jones & Katz, 2019).