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<\/div>The melting of Thwaites glacier is expected to accelerate<\/p>\n
International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n
A six-year investigation into the vast Thwaites glacier<\/a> in Antarctica has concluded with a grim outlook on its future.<\/p>\n Often dubbed the \u201cdoomsday glacier\u201d, this huge mass of ice is comparable in size to Britain or Florida and its collapse alone would raise sea levels by 65 centimetres. Worse still, this is expected to trigger a more widespread loss of the ice sheet covering West Antarctica, causing a calamitous sea level rise of 3.3 metres and threatening cities like New York, Kolkata and Shanghai.<\/p>\n It is an extremely remote and difficult area to get to, but the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), a joint UK-US research programme, has managed to deploy 100 scientists there over the past six years, using planes, ships and underwater robots to study the dynamics of this ice in detail.\u00a0 \u201cIt was a tremendous challenge, and yet we really learned a lot,\u201d says Ted Scambos<\/a> at University of Colorado Boulder.<\/p>\n These discoveries include the fact that Thwaites glacier is particularly vulnerable, as it rests on a bed of rock that is well below sea level and is being melted from the underside by warmer seawater. What\u2019s more, the bedrock slopes downwards towards the interior of the ice sheet, so, as the glacier retreats, even more ice is exposed to warm seawater, threatening to accelerate the collapse.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cThe bed gets deeper and deeper,\u201d says Mathieu Morlighem<\/a> at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, a member of the ITGC team. \u201cWe know that\u2019s unstable.\u201d He and his colleagues used computer models to predict the future state of the glacier under different levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, finding that \u201cfor almost any carbon emission scenarios, we run into this instability\u201d and the glacier front retreats inland. The key question is how quickly this might happen.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not going to instantaneously lead to a catastrophic retreat in the next year or the year after, but, at the same time, we are very sure that Thwaites is going to continue to retreat, and ultimately the retreat is going to accelerate,\u201d says Rob Larter<\/a> at the British Antarctic Survey, another member of the team. \u201cWe can\u2019t put an exact time frame on that.\u201d<\/p>\n Ultimately, however, the ITCG researchers think that, by the end of the 23rd<\/sup> century, Thwaites glacier and much of the West Antarctic ice sheet might be lost.<\/p>\n The slightly better news is that we still have time to influence how rapidly this process occurs, by making drastic efforts to reduce carbon emissions. \u201cWe can buy us time,\u201d says Morlighem. \u201cWe still have control on how quickly Thwaites loses mass.\u201d<\/p>\n Topics:<\/p>\n<\/section><\/div>\n