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POOR Greenland. Not only is its ice sheet melting thanks to rising temperatures, its rocks are being threatened by heat from below.

The rock beneath Greenland is hotter than expected given its radioactivity. Now a team led by Alexey Petrunin from the GFZ Helmholtz Centre Potsdam in Germany have combined seismic and gravitational data to estimate the thickness of Greenland’s lithosphere, the rocky part of Earth’s surface. They found that it is 80 to 100 kilometres thick, less than the 200 to 250 kilometres typically seen elsewhere on Earth ().

This thinning is caused by a plume of magma that’s rising up and eroding Greenland, giving the rocks their heat, says Petrunin.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Erosion by Earth’s central heating”