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Can geothermal heat perturb climate?

Heat from the earth’s interior geothermal heat (GH) leaks through the earth‘s crust into the atmosphere and oceans at a rate which is very small compared to meteorological heat fluxes (Table 1). Therefore, climate modellers make no allowance for geothermal heat flux (GHF) in current climate models (e.g. Peixoto and Oort 1992). While this exclusion of GHF is justified for land surfaces (even in volcanic eruptions), what happens to GH entering the deep ocean? The residence time of deep-ocean water has been estimated to be of order 3000 years (Woods 1984), and raises the question as to whether a slow accumulation of trapped GH might have thermal and dynamical consequences for the ocean and perhaps, therefore, for climate on some time-scales? A search of oceanographic or meteorological literature failed to reveal any discussion of this topic, but limited references have been found in some geophysical journals, mainly in connection with GH emitted from mid-ocean submarine ridges. This note discusses the possibility of a link between GH and climate. There are three main questions: