![]() ![]() "Unfortunately, this is still going to be a major issue a century from now," Scambos said in an email. Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center said the recent results add to understanding how Thwaites is diminishing. There's no place to land a plane," NSF's Cutler said. The main trunk's glacier surface "is so messed up by crevasses, it looks like a set of sugar cubes almost. But that would require a helicopter to land on the ice instead of a heavier airplane and would be incredibly difficult, said Eric Rignot of the University of California Irvine. The key to seeing exactly how bad conditions are on the glacier would require going to the main trunk and looking at the melting from below. Researchers couldn't safely land a plane and drill a hole in the ice in the main trunk, which is breaking up much faster. When ice is on ground as part of the glacier, it isn't part of sea rise, but when it breaks off land and then goes onto water, it adds to the overall water level by displacement, just as ice added to a glass of water raises water level.Īnd more bad news: the new research is from the eastern, larger and more stable part of Thwaites. The more the glacier breaks up or retreats, the more ice floats in water. ![]() The pencil-shaped robot is giving scientists their first look at the forces eating away at the Thwaites glacier.ĭavis said the melting isn't nearly the problem. A robot nicknamed Icefin is deployed at Thwaites glacier in Antarctica in January 2020. Now for the good news: Much of the flat underwater area the scientists explored is melting much slower than they expected.īut that doesn't really change how much ice is coming off the land part of the glacier and driving up sea levels, Davis said. Pennsylvania State University glaciologist Richard Alley, who also wasn't part of the studies, said the new work "gives us an important look at processes affecting the crevasses that might eventually break and cause loss of much of the ice shelf." "I am definitely expecting the rapid change to continue and accelerate over the next few years." "Thwaites is a rapidly changing system, much more rapidly changing than when we started this work five years ago and even since we were in the field three years ago," said Oregon State University ice researcher Erin Pettit, who wasn't involved in either study. The melting of Thwaites is dominated by what's happening underneath, where warmer water nibbles at the bottom, something called basal melting, said Peter Davis, an oceanographer at British Antarctic Survey, who is a lead author of one of the studies. "Similar rapid retreat pulses are likely to occur in the near future," the study said. ![]() A study conducted by marine physicist Alastair Graham at the University of South Florida last year suggested that, despite observations indicating the glacier's melting rate had slowed down compared with previous evaluation periods, it would likely accelerate soon. Researchers say the glacier is in a phase characterized by "rapid retreat," or "collapse," when a broader geological timeline is considered. The glacier's rapid changes have concerned scientists for years. As the planet continues to warm, ice that composes the glacier is melting, like much of the sea ice that surrounds the Earth's north and south poles. The work comes out of a massive $50 million multiyear international research effort to better understand the Florida-sized glacier, which could make sea levels rise more than 2 feet if it melts, though that's expected to take hundreds of years.Īt about 80 miles in width, the Thwaites Glacier is the widest on Earth. But with the robot (named Icefin) lowered down a slender, 1,925-foot hole, they saw how important crevasses are in the fracturing of the ice, which takes the heaviest toll on the glacier, even more than melting. Using a 13-foot pencil-shaped robot that swam under the grounding line where ice first juts over the sea, scientists saw a shimmery critical point in Thwaites' chaotic breakup, "where it's melting so quickly, there's just material streaming out of the glacier," said robot creator and polar scientist Britney Schmidt of Cornell University.īefore, scientists had no observations from this critical but hard-to-reach point on the Thwaites Glacier. Scientists got their first close-up look at what is eating away part of Antarctica's Thwaites ice shelf, nicknamed the "doomsday glacier" because of how much ice it has and how much seas could rise if it all melts - and it's both good and bad news. Ice shelf on Antarctica's "doomsday glacier" could shatter in next 5 years, researchers warn 05:18 ![]()
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