Thomas Lamb · June 10, 2026 · Part VI — Science Deep Dive
Two Roads
to the Same Fire
An Alaska Air Force meteorologist and a Tokyo Institute of Technology geologist reached the same conclusion from opposite directions — that Earth's internal heat is an unaccounted driver of ocean warming and climate change. Neither knew the other existed. The science that vindicates both of them is now arriving. This is the deep dive.
In science, when two researchers working independently, using different data, different methods, and different starting points arrive at the same conclusion — that convergence is one of the strongest signals that the conclusion is real. It is not proof. But it is the kind of evidence that demands serious investigation rather than dismissal.
This post documents two such researchers. One is a US Air Force meteorologist who studied volcanic eruptions over Alaska and noticed that the warmest ocean on Earth sits directly above the most volcanically active seafloor on Earth. The other is Japan's most decorated geologist, who spent thirty years mapping the mantle dynamics beneath the Pacific and concluded that Earth's internal heat engine — not greenhouse gases — is the primary driver of the climate shifts that have shaped every major warming and cooling event in planetary history.
They were working at the same time, in the same region of the planet, on opposite ends of the same question. They never collaborated. They may never have heard of each other. And yet the framework they each independently built points to the same gap at the center of mainstream climate science — a gap that the director of NASA's own climate monitoring institute has now publicly admitted exists.
The Two Researchers
Bottom-Up Observer
Thomas Lamb
US Air Force Meteorologist · Alaska
Top-Down Theorist
Prof. Shigenori Maruyama
Tokyo Institute of Technology · Japan
What They Each Found — Independently
The convergence between these two frameworks is not superficial. Working from completely different data and methodologies, Lamb and Maruyama identified the same mechanism operating at different scales:
The Heat Source
Lamb: Hydrothermal vents and submarine volcanoes above the Indonesian arc inject heat bottom-up into the Maluku, Banda and Halmahera Seas.
Maruyama: The Pacific Superplume transports core heat upward through the mantle, expressing as volcanic and hydrothermal activity along the western Pacific arc system.
The Anomaly
Lamb: The warmest sustained ocean on Earth is concentrated precisely over the volcanic arc — not uniformly across the Pacific as greenhouse forcing would predict.
Maruyama: The Pacific superswell is 3,000km across and 300m higher than the surrounding ocean floor — a topographic expression of the rising superplume beneath it.
The CO₂ Question
Lamb: Warmer oceans outgas more dissolved CO₂. The rise in atmospheric CO₂ may be partly a consequence of ocean warming driven from below, not solely a cause of it.
Maruyama: During the Cretaceous superplume event, mantle CO₂ was carried directly to the ocean surface — CO₂ rise preceded and drove warming, with the mantle as source.
The Model Gap
Lamb: The NGMs he worked with during his Air Force service were producing skewed warming data because they did not account for all forcing variables — geothermal and volcanic heat among them.
Maruyama: Climate models do not incorporate mantle dynamics or superplume heat transport. They are fundamentally incomplete at the timescales that matter for understanding what is driving the current anomaly.
Timeline — Two Parallel Paths
The Research Landscape — Where Science Stands
| Researcher / Body | Position | Status vs Framework |
|---|---|---|
| Thomas Lamb (2004) | Western Pacific SST anomaly concentrated over volcanic arc — geothermal and hydrothermal forcing unaccounted for in climate models | 22 YRS AHEAD |
| Shigenori Maruyama (1994–2013) | Pacific Superplume drives surface heat expression — Earth's internal heat engine primary climate driver historically and presently | INDEPENDENT PARALLEL |
| Arthur Viterito (2016) | Mid-ocean seismic activity correlated with global temperature at r=0.785 from 1979–2015 — geothermal forcing drives Indo-Pacific Warm Pool | INDEPENDENT PARALLEL |
| Dr. Iskandar et al. (2020, Indonesia) | Documents 3× above-average warming in Maluku/Banda/Halmahera Seas — cannot explain with atmospheric forcing. Gap identified but not investigated. | PARTIAL — GAP OPEN |
| Dr. Siringan et al. (Dec 2025, Philippines) | Confirms active hydrothermal gas discharge from Sulu Sea submarine volcano. Caldera confirmed in Celebes Sea. Has not connected to SST warming trend. | PARTIAL — GAP OPEN |
| Gavin Schmidt / NASA GISS (2024) | "Models can't explain 2023's huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory." 0.2°C unexplained excess warming. No combination of known factors sufficient. | MAINSTREAM — GAP ADMITTED |
| Hofmann et al. | Without geothermal heat fluxes, abyssal ocean would be 0.5°C cooler and abyssal circulation would weaken 25–50%. Accepted but treated as background, not forcing. | ACCEPTED — UNDERWEIGHTED |
| NOAA / IPCC mainstream | Global average geothermal flux of 0.087 W/m² is negligible vs greenhouse forcing. Attributes Indo-Pacific warm pool expansion entirely to anthropogenic GHG. | INCOMPLETE MODEL |
The Admission at the Center of the Establishment
The most significant development in this entire scientific story is not a paper by Lamb or Maruyama. It is a paper published in Nature in March 2024 by Gavin Schmidt — the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the world's most prominent climate monitoring institution.
"It's humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists' predictive capabilities more than 2023 has. Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2°C more than climate scientists expected. As yet, no combination of proposed mechanisms has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened."
— Gavin Schmidt, Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Nature, vol. 627, March 2024.The temperature spike in 2023 arrived months before El Niño peaked — anomalous even by the standards of the standard attribution framework. Schmidt's proposed explanations included greenhouse gases, aerosol reductions, Hunga Tonga water vapor, and solar activity. Submarine volcanic geothermal forcing — the contribution Lamb identified in 2004 and Maruyama mapped from below in 1994 — was not among them.
The 0.2°C unexplained excess is not a rounding error. At planetary scale, 0.2°C is an enormous amount of energy. It represents a forcing that the best-funded, most sophisticated climate modelling infrastructure in the world cannot account for. The question is not whether there is a gap. Schmidt has confirmed there is. The question is what is in it.
The Flaw in the Mainstream Dismissal
The standard rebuttal to the geothermal forcing argument is simple: the globally averaged geothermal heat flux is approximately 0.087 watts per square meter — roughly 40 times smaller than the radiative forcing from greenhouse gases. Therefore it is negligible.
This argument has a fundamental flaw. It uses a global average to dismiss a regional phenomenon. Geothermal heat flux is not uniformly distributed across the ocean floor. It is massively concentrated along mid-ocean ridges, subduction zones, and volcanic arcs — the same arcs that run directly beneath the western Pacific warm pool.
The Juan de Fuca Ridge off Oregon has a single vent field over 500 feet wide with more than 15 individual vents each offering an estimated 40 gigawatts of thermal energy — continuously. The Indonesian arc has hundreds of such features, most unmapped. The Philippine seafloor survey in December 2025 just confirmed active hydrothermal discharge in the Sulu Sea. The Celebes Sea caldera sits adjacent to today's M7.8 earthquake zone.
Averaging this concentrated regional heat output across the entire global ocean floor and concluding it is negligible is like averaging the heat output of a blast furnace across a football stadium and concluding the furnace doesn't matter. The question is not what happens when you spread the heat across the whole ocean. The question is what happens to the water sitting directly above the furnace.
What Three Independent Lines of Evidence Agree On
▸ The eastern Indonesian seas warm at 3× the global ocean average — concentrated precisely over the submarine volcanic arc (Iskandar et al. 2020, NOAA CoralTemp 1985–2026)
▸ The Pacific Superplume actively transports core heat upward through the western Pacific system — its surface expression is the Pacific Superswell (Maruyama 1994–2006, seismic tomography)
▸ Active hydrothermal gas discharge is ongoing from submarine volcanoes in the Sulu and Celebes Seas — directly confirmed by in-situ sonar in December 2025 (Siringan et al., UP Marine Science Institute)
▸ The best climate models cannot explain 0.2°C of observed warming — the gap exists even after accounting for all known atmospheric factors (Schmidt, NASA GISS, Nature 2024)
▸ More than 70% of Earth's magmatic output occurs in the ocean — submarine volcanism is simultaneously the most common and least studied forcing on Earth (Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 2025)
What Needs to Happen
The scientific question Thomas Lamb asked in 2004 and Shigenori Maruyama approached from below in 1994 has never been seriously investigated in the context of current climate forcing. The reasons are partly institutional — climate science, volcanology, and deep ocean geophysics are siloed disciplines with different journals, different funding bodies, and different professional cultures. The atmospheric scientists model the atmosphere. The oceanographers model the ocean. The volcanologists study volcanoes. Nobody is required to connect them into a single integrated system.
The studies that need to be done are specific and achievable. Heat budget analysis of the Maluku, Banda and Halmahera Seas that explicitly accounts for bottom-up geothermal flux alongside surface forcing. Comparison of Iskandar's 2020 warming trend data against Maruyama's superplume heat transport maps. Integration of Siringan's December 2025 Philippine hydrothermal discharge data with the regional SST anomaly record. Construction of a coupled climate model that includes variable submarine volcanic forcing — not a fixed global average, but the actual spatially variable heat flux map that now exists from decades of seafloor surveys.
None of this is technically difficult. All of the data either exists or is being collected. What is missing is the institutional willingness to ask the question — and the monitoring infrastructure to answer it. The Ocean Observatories Initiative, now being dismantled, was beginning to accumulate the subsurface time series that would eventually provide the answer. That data stream is being cut precisely as the most energetic El Niño in recorded history — fed by the warmest western Pacific in the satellite era — makes the question most urgent.
The Record
Thomas Lamb published his observation in 2004. Shigenori Maruyama published his theoretical foundation in 1994 and his historical evidence in 2001. Arthur Viterito published his statistical correlation in 2016. Dr. Iskandar documented the unexplained warming anomaly in 2020. Dr. Siringan confirmed hydrothermal discharge in December 2025. Gavin Schmidt admitted the models cannot explain 2023 in March 2024. The Japan Meteorological Agency declared El Niño officially begun today, June 10, 2026, with 100% probability of continuation.
The pieces are all in the record. They have been accumulating for thirty years across independent researchers on three continents. What they are waiting for is a synthesis — an integrated framework that connects the mantle to the surface, the seafloor to the atmosphere, the volcanic arc to the warm pool, the warm pool to El Niño, and El Niño to the 318 million people already in crisis hunger before it peaks.
Two roads to the same fire. The fire is real. The roads are documented. The question is whether anyone in a position of scientific authority will walk them.
— Thomas Lamb, June 10, 2026The Convergence Series — Thomas Lamb
Part I: Climate Science Revisited (2004) — The Original Observation →
Part II: The Furnace Below — Magma, Ocean Heat & El Niño
Part III: Indonesia SST Deep Dive — 41 Years of NOAA Data
Part IV: Going Blind — Dismantling NOAA During a Super El Niño
Part V: It Has Begun — JMA Official Declaration, June 10 2026
Part VI: Two Roads to the Same Fire — The Science Deep Dive (this post)
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