Beneath the West Antarctica ice sheet are hidden subglacial volcanoes that may be contributing to the melting of the Thwaites Glacier.

According to LiveScience.com, a new study has found that areas of the glacier nearest tot the "hotspots" are melting faster than those farther away. The melting could be a problem for West Antarctica because it has already experienced ice loss.

"It's not just the fact that there is melting water, and that water is coming out," study lead author Dustin Schroeder, a geophysicist at the University of Texas - Austin, told LiveScience. "It's how that affects the flow and stability of the ice."

Past studies have singled out West Antarctica for its ice loss and some scientists have said it is irreversible due to climate change. In a separate study last year, scientists even found a previously undiscovered volcano beneath the area's ice sheet.

Schroeder said the main obstacle facing his team is understanding subglacial geothermal energy. The team would like to generate computer models to predict future ice melt and the subsequent rise in sea level, but measuring geothermal energy beneath the ice sheet has proven extremely difficult.

"It's the most complex thermal environment you might imagine," study co-author Don Blankenship, a senior research scientist at UT, said in a press release. "And then you plop the most critical dynamically unstable ice sheet on planet Earth in the middle of this thing, and then you try to model it. It's virtually impossible."

For this reason, the researchers know understanding geothermal energy beneath the ice is essential for predicting the future of West Antarctica. The Thwaites Glacier is seen as important because its collapse would raise the global sea level an estimated one or two meters.

The researchers published their work, as well as a previous study, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Said Schroeder, who received his PhD in May, in the release: "The combination of variable subglacial geothermal heat flow and the interacting subglacial water system could threaten the stability of Thwaites Glacier in ways that we never before imagined."