Thwaites Glacier is crumbling, and fast—if it melts entirely, it could add 10 feet to sea levels. Now Antarctic scientists are racing to survey the damage.
, funded by the US and UK governments, are also investigating the glacier’s hard-to-reach underbelly. At a meeting of the American Geophysical Union last month, they updated the public with their recent findings. And yeah, things aren’t looking good.
Without a cohesive ice shelf holding it back, the ice sheet on land will accelerate its own seaward march, as well as that of its neighbors. “As Thwaites Glacier loses mass and it flows out more quickly into the ocean, it will be pulling on the nearby glaciers,” says Pettit. Thus the name “Doomsday Glacier.”Other scientists have turned their attention to Thwaites’ grounding zone, where the glacier transitions from land to floating on water.
This revelation gives glaciologists critical insight into how glaciers everywhere might be degrading—and is a factor they haven’t yet accounted for in modeling. “This sort of other way of melting along these sloped ice surfaces is just not in ice sheet models,” Washam says. “What this shows us is this is something that has to be considered if we're going to more accurately project Antarctica's contribution to sea level rise.
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