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At a Glance A recent study suggests eruptions from volcanoes may be accelerating the melting of ice sheets in the Arctic.

The explosions impact the ice sheets even if they are thousands of miles away, due to ash traveling through the air.

Prior research suggests glacial and ice sheet melt could also increase how often volcanoes erupt.

As warming temperatures continue to threaten Arctic sea ice, a recent study suggests that volcano eruptions are also playing a role in depleting the frozen sheets.

A team of researchers from Columbia University has found that volcanic eruptions have likely been accelerating the rate at which Arctic ice sheets melt .

The discovery was made after they studied deposits of meltwater and ice cores that indicated ancient explosions had triggered instant and significant melting of an ice sheet that covered much of northern Europe at the end of the last ice age, roughly 12,000 to 13,000 years ago, according to a release on the study.

"Over a time span of 1,000 years, we found that volcanic eruptions generally correspond with enhanced ice sheet melting within a year or so," lead author and Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory postdoctoral fellow Francesco Muschitiello said in the release.

In some instances, the volcanoes were thousands of miles away from the sheets, but the massive clouds of ash from the eruptions took to the skies and fell across the ice sheets, the researchers report. This caused them to absorb more heat than usual and become darker in color.

“We know that if you have darker ice, you decrease the reflectance and it melts more quickly. It’s basic science,” said Muschitiello. “But no one so far has been able to demonstrate this direct link between volcanism and ice melting when it comes to ancient climates.”

Sea ice has been on a steady decline in the Arctic. Researchers suggest it could be a thing of the past by the 2030s as it’s disappearing in all seasons, with the fastest shrinkage in the summer months. Old ice, which has formed the bedrock of sea ice for decades, is also declining, leaving new ice that’s susceptible to melt in its place.

(MORE: 'Lucifer' Heat Waves Spurred by Climate Change Expected to Become New Norm for Europe )

Cross-sections of the deposits, known as glacial varves, collected in the 1980s and 1990s helped the scientists make the discovery. Varves are layers of sediment that are formed when the meltwater underneath an ice sheet pushes large amounts of debris into lakes near the edge of the sheet.

These layers of sediment help the researchers see what climate conditions were like each year, similar to the rings of a tree. Thicker layers indicate more melting occurred, as more water would have been needed to push the sediment around, according to the release.

The scientists compared the valves to cores collected from the Greenland ice sheet and discovered that there were years of explosive volcanic eruptions, according to the study. The ice sheet’s layers, which hold a record of the ancient conditions of the atmosphere, matched up with the thicker valve layers, which indicates there was more melting of the sheet.

Glaciologist and study coauthor James Lea says it’s difficult to put an exact number to how much melting a major eruption could cause, states the release. A series of model simulations showed that the amount of melting is particular to each individual eruption, the season it happens in, the amount of snowpack at the time, and the ice sheet’s elevation.

“Change any one of these and you would get different amounts of melt,” said Lea.

In the worst-case scenarios, the ash deposits wiped out between eight inches to almost three feet of ice from the surface of the highest parts of the sheet, the researchers report.

According to Muschitiello, the initial results suggest that “present day ice sheets are potentially very vulnerable to volcanic eruptions.”

The researchers’ findings also suggest there’s a possible hole in the climate models used to make predictions. According to them, the models do not currently simulate how ice sheets respond to changes in particle deposits from the atmosphere.

Prior research suggests glacial and ice sheet melt could increase how often volcanoes in those icy areas erupt, according to the release. This is due to the melt lightening the load on the crust of the earth, which lets the magma underneath rise.

If this link is confirmed, it would suggest that there is a “positive feedback loop” in which eruptions accelerate melting, which in turn causes more eruptions.