Thwaites Glacier melting set to accelerate
International collaboration around the Thwaites Glacier
A six-year investigation into the immense Thwaites Glacier The Antarctic survey concluded with a gloomy outlook for its future.
Often dubbed the “glacier of the apocalypse,” the massive ice slab is comparable in size to Britain or Florida, and its collapse alone would cause a 65-centimeter rise in sea levels. Worse still, it is expected to cause a larger loss of the ice sheet covering West Antarctica, causing a catastrophic 3.3-meter rise in sea levels and threatening cities including New York, Kolkata and Shanghai.
It’s an extremely remote and difficult-to-access area, but the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), a joint UK-US research programme, has managed to deploy 100 scientists there over the last six years, using planes, ships and underwater robots to study the dynamics of the ice in detail. “It was a huge challenge, but we really learned a lot,” he says. Ted Scambos at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
These findings show that Thwaites Glacier is particularly vulnerable because it sits on a bed of rock well below sea level that is melting in the face of warmer seawater. In addition, the bedrock is tilting inward from the ice sheet, so that as the glacier retreats, more ice is exposed to warmer seawater, threatening to accelerate the collapse.
“The bed is getting deeper and deeper,” he said. Mathieu Morlighem Dr. Jensen, of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, a member of the ITGC team, said: “We know this glacier is unstable.” He and his colleagues used computer models to predict the future state of the glacier under different levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They found that “for almost all carbon emission scenarios, we end up with this instability” and that the glacier front is retreating inland. The key question is how quickly this could happen.
“It’s not going to instantly lead to a catastrophic decline next year or the year after, but at the same time we’re very confident that Thwaites is going to continue to decline, and eventually the decline is going to accelerate,” he said. Rob Larter “We can’t give a specific date for that,” said another member of the British Antarctic Survey team.
Ultimately, however, ITCG researchers believe that by the end of the 23rd Over the next century, the Thwaites Glacier and much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could disappear.
The good news is that we still have time to influence the speed of this process, by making drastic efforts to reduce carbon emissions. “We can buy time,” Morlighem says. “We still have control over the rate at which Thwaites loses mass.”
