As the Thwaites glacier loses its grip on Antarctica\u2019s western edge, a small group of scientists is proposing radical interventions like drilling heat-exchanging devices into the ice and creating artificial \u201cspeed bumps\u201d on its bed to slow its collapse. Other glaciologists say the schemes are infeasible and a dangerous distraction from cutting emissions.<\/p>\n
But there is wide consensus that the clock is ticking on the mighty glacier responsible for around 4% of current sea-level rise\u2014a melting piece of our planet\u2019s story.<\/p>\n
On December 7, 1972, an Apollo 17 astronaut took the Blue Marble<\/a> photograph. Captured four years after Earthrise<\/a>, the photo credited with launching the global environmental movement, this breathtaking image marked the first time earthbound humans had ever seen their planet in the round. It was also the first time humanity had seen Antarctica from space, a whorl of brilliant white ice and clouds, out of which the otherwise blue, green, and umber planet seemed to rise.<\/p>\n The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide that year was 328 parts per million (ppm), meaning 328 out of every million air molecules were a greenhouse gas that traps heat close to Earth\u2019s surface. This was already up from a pre-industrial baseline of roughly 285 ppm in 1850.<\/p>\n Fifty-four years on, that number has climbed to 431 ppm, and glaciers of the West Antarctic are receding, none faster than the mammoth Thwaites.<\/p>\n A Marine Glacier Melting Down<\/p>\n Thwaites is the widest glacier on Earth\u2014120 kilometres across at its front edge and up to four kilometres thick in places. Should it melt completely, Thwaites alone contains enough ice to raise sea levels by 65 centimetres.<\/p>\n Even in the absence of other drivers of sea level rise<\/a>, such an event would force millions of people to relocate, with Asian countries especially vulnerable. A sudden collapse of Thwaites is unlikely<\/a> in the next few decades, but the glacier is shedding ice five times faster than in the 1990s, by one recent estimate<\/a>.<\/p>\n Some researchers fear that Thwaites cannot be saved\u2014that no amount of emissions reductions will stop it from melting away into the Southern Ocean. Thwaites is particularly vulnerable because it is a marine ice sheet. Like the much larger West Antarctic ice sheet of which it is a part, Thwaites rests on bedrock deep below sea level. It is especially exposed to warming ocean waters that are steadily eating away at its underbelly.<\/p>\n A \u2018Grim\u2019 Outlook<\/p>\n In February 2026, researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research identified +1\u00b0C as the temperature threshold beyond which Thwaites and its much smaller neighbour glacier, Pine Island, will inevitably lose ice mass sufficient to generate 90 centimetres of long-term sea level rise.<\/p>\n With global heating now standing at roughly 1.3\u00b0C, Thwaites may already be in a state of irreversible collapse, wrote<\/a> the Potsdam team. Three years ago, a team of United Kingdom scientists warned <\/a>of \u201cunavoidable future increase in West Antarctic ice-shelf melting over the twenty-first century.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSubstantial ocean warming and ice-shelf melting [is] projected in all future climate scenarios,\u201d including \u201cthe most ambitious targets of the Paris Agreement,\u201d wrote lead author Kaitlin Naughten, a climate modeller with the British Antarctic Survey\u2019s Polar Ocean Team. Rapid decarbonization can do little now to stop Thwaites\u2019 substantial disintegration.<\/p>\n The glacier\u2019s future is \u201cgrim,\u201d wrote<\/a> the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) in a September 2025 briefing about findings from a seven-year effort by more than 100 scientists to learn as much as possible about the glacier\u2019s response to global heating, and what it means for sea-level rise.<\/p>\n \u201cWarm water at depth from the Amundsen Sea continues to melt the front and underside of the glacier and ocean models show the temperature of this water will continue to increase through this century,\u201d warned the ITGC.<\/p>\n The timeline for Thwaites\u2019 demise remains highly uncertain, however, because so many of the complex interactions that will determine its fate\u2014between ice and ocean, between ice and bedrock\u2014remain hidden from view, thousands of metres beneath the surface..<\/p>\n Thanks in part to a first-time deployment of underwater robots,\u00a0 ITGC\u2019s now completed research effort has yielded many critical insights\u2014and many more questions.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the main things that has come out of all the research we\u2019ve done in Antarctica, is that a lot of things are much more complicated than anybody realized,\u201d Robert Larter, veteran marine geophysicist with the British Antarctic Survey and ITGC deputy lead scientist, told The Energy Mix in an interview.<\/p>\n Could We Geoengineer A Fix?<\/p>\n Some 150 years ago, an ice stream flowing under the Ross Ice Shelf\u2014more than 1,000 kilometres to the east of Thwaites\u2014suddenly stopped moving. A widely accepted theory is that the Kamb Ice Stream (formerly Ice Stream C) stagnated when an adjacent ice stream (known as B) robbed it of the water that was lubricating its steady flow into the Ross Sea. Thwarted by this act of \u201cwater piracy<\/a>,\u201d the ice stream was effectively frozen in its tracks, and has remained so, ever since.<\/p>\n For Brent Minchew, Caltech professor of geophysics, this event provides a natural analogue for a geoengineering feat that could save Thwaites. Briefly, passive heat exchange devices called thermosyphons drilled down into the glacier could be used to draw heat up and away from its melting undercarriage, thereby refreezing Thwaites to its bed. Some 120,000 such devices have been keeping the permafrost around the Trans-Alaska pipeline frozen since it was built in 1974.<\/p>\n A decade-long deployment of some 10,000 such thermosyphons might well be enough to do the trick, Minchew told <\/a>Sally Kornbluth, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), during a podcast in February 2025. Co-founder and chief scientist at the emerging Ar\u00eate Glacier Initiative<\/a>, Minchew is one of a small group of scientists who believe that it\u2019s time for geoengineering solutions to halt the meltdown of the world\u2019s glaciers.<\/p>\n The thermosyphon proposals\u00a0 \u201care only ideas at this stage,\u201d Minchew and his co-founder Colin Meyer wrote<\/a> in a January 2026 op-ed in the Guardian. Other<\/a> ideas include building \u201cspeed bumps\u201d into the base of Thwaites to stymie its seaward slide.<\/p>\n \u201cIt will take years of research and development to understand if and how we might stabilize ice sheets,\u201d Minchew and Meyer wrote, stressing the need for \u201cscientific discipline and environmental responsibility\u201d alongside \u201cinnovation and speed.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe cannot \u2018move fast and break things\u2019\u2014but we also cannot afford to debate until the tide is at our door.\u201d<\/p>\n The Thwaites Will Be Gone<\/p>\n Rising tides and ticking clocks are precisely why glaciologists should be united against polar geoengineering, say its critics. Minchew and Meyer\u2019s Guardian op-ed appeared five months after a group of more than 40 top glaciologists from around the world, including ITGC deputy scientist Larter, published<\/a> an exhaustive rebuttal of polar geoengineering in Frontiers in Science.<\/p>\n Led by Martin Siegert, a glaciologist at the University of Exeter, the authors \u201cfelt the need to push back after polar geoengineering was discussed by panels at the annual United Nations climate summit in Dubai in 2023,\u201d reports<\/a> Scientific American.<\/p>\n Evaluating five polar-geoengineering ideas currently under development, including giant \u201csea curtains\u201d deployed to keep warm ocean waters back from the edge of Thwaites, the scientists rejected them all as technically and\/or logistically infeasible, environmentally damaging, prohibitively expensive, unethical, and illegal under the international laws that govern Antarctica.<\/p>\n The glaciologists warned that promoting geoengineering fixes for a problem caused by global heating risks encouraging complacency or false hope in ordinary people, and \u201cpredatory delay\u201d in those whose interest lies in maintaining the fossil-fueled status quo.<\/p>\n And sure enough, opportunities for \u201cice-washing\u201d are beginning to germinate: a proposal for \u201cice-credits\u201d based on Arctic ice thickening has been submitted to controversial<\/a> carbon credit review agency Verra<\/a>. The project has been put on hold, but another review is promised in 2027.<\/p>\n Humanity\u2019s efforts to keep Antarctica frozen must concentrate on deep and rapid decarbonization using mitigation strategies that have been proven to work, rather than \u201cspeculative solutions with uncertain outcomes,\u201d Siegert and his team write.<\/p>\n While Thwaites, and even the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in the longer term, are likely now past saving, \u201cother regions of Antarctica are unlikely to lose substantial mass if current emissions targets are met,\u201d wrote UK climate modeller Naughten in her 2023 study.<\/p>\n \u201cIt may be too late for Thwaites, but if we carry on what we\u2019re doing, we\u2019re going to destabilize marine-based sectors of the East Antarctic in the same way, and so mitigation is absolutely essential,\u201d glaciologist Larter told The Mix. \u201cWe may have created a big problem for ourselves, but if we carry on in this way, we\u2019re going to make it a lot worse.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the Thwaites glacier loses its grip on Antarctica\u2019s western edge, a small group of scientists is proposing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618274,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[181133,49,48,110375,45068,66],"class_list":["post-618273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-byline-internal","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-deep-dives","tag-dow","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618273\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}