"Glaciers tend to suppress the volume of eruptions from the volcanoes beneath them," said University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student and lead author Pablo Moreno-Yaeger in a statement. "But as glaciers retreat due to climate change, our findings suggest these volcanoes go on to erupt more frequently and more explosively."
We think that the observed slowdown on Kohler West Glacier is due to the redirection of ice flow towards its neighbor - Kohler East. This is due to the large change in Kohler West's surface slope, likely caused by the vastly different thinning rates on its neighboring glaciers.