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The glacier\u2019s full collapse would raise global sea levels by around 26 inches (65 centimeters), flooding coastal communities on every inhabited continent. That collapse would take centuries.<\/p>\n
But a new warning suggests one of the main things slowing it down is about to disappear.<\/p>\n
An ice shelf poised to disintegrate <\/p>\n
The Thwaites<\/a> eastern ice shelf \u2013 a floating body of ice attached to the glacier\u2019s front that acts as a natural brake on the flow of ice toward the sea \u2013 could begin breaking apart as early as 2026.<\/p>\n Robert Larter is a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey<\/a> who coordinates the UK side of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration<\/a>, the joint US-UK research effort studying the glacier.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe last bit of ice shelf in front of the glacier is poised to disintegrate,\u201d said Larter. \u201cWe don\u2019t know quite how this ice shelf is going to break up, but it\u2019s definitely going to go,\u201d said Larter.<\/p>\n Cracks are spreading<\/p>\n The nickname \u201cDoomsday Glacier\u201d sounds like an exaggeration, but it isn\u2019t. Thwaites isn\u2019t just a very large glacier \u2013 it\u2019s a structural pillar holding back much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.<\/p>\n If Thwaites goes, it destabilizes the ice behind it. If the whole West Antarctic Ice Sheet eventually follows, sea levels rise<\/a> by around 11 feet (3.3 meters).\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s not a distant theoretical scenario for modellers to argue about.<\/p>\n A climate tipping point<\/p>\n Scientists consider the eventual collapse of Thwaites Glacier and the ice behind it a genuine long-term possibility. <\/p>\n They treat the glacier\u2019s trajectory as a climate tipping point<\/a> \u2013 a threshold that triggers irreversible changes lasting thousands of years once crossed.<\/p>\n Thwaites has been losing ice at an accelerating pace since the 1980s, shedding hundreds of billions of tons and retreating around 12 miles (20 kilometers) since 1992.<\/p>\n The mechanism is brutal. Warm, salty ocean water pushes up from the deep ocean and attacks the glacier at its weakest point, melting the ice from below where it meets the bedrock. <\/p>\n This configuration makes the melting hard to stop once it gets going.<\/p>\n The doorstop is breaking<\/p>\n The eastern ice shelf<\/a> sits at the glacier\u2019s mouth, held in place partly by an underwater ridge on the ocean floor. <\/p>\n Its job is to act as a doorstop wedged against the outward flow of ice and slowing how quickly Thwaites reaches the sea.<\/p>\n Satellite images show the shelf fracturing at the points where it\u2019s anchored, and Larter said that movement on the western side of the shelf has roughly doubled over the past eight months.\u00a0<\/p>\n The fracturing is happening where the shelf meets the ridge and at the glacier\u2019s front \u2013 the two places where it\u2019s most constrained. When those constraints go, the ice behind them moves faster.<\/p>\n Once the shelf breaks apart, it can no longer slow the glacier\u2019s flow into the ocean. No other ice formation is in place to replace that restraining function.<\/p>\n What is the cause?<\/p>\n Larter is careful about how he describes the cause. It\u2019s not simply that the ocean is warmer \u2013 it\u2019s that changes in how the ocean circulates are pushing warm water where it wasn\u2019t reaching before.\u00a0<\/p>\n The westerly winds<\/a> circling Antarctica have been shifting, altering ocean circulation in ways that drive warm deep water up onto the continental shelf and under the ice.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is an active scientific debate about exactly how this works, but it seems pretty clear that in some way, the changes to the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds are what is driving warm water onto the continent,\u201d Larter said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAnd those wind changes are part of the wider pattern of climate change that we\u2019re seeing.\u201d<\/p>\n A glacier without brakes<\/p>\n No one is saying Thwaites is about to collapse next year. A glacier this large takes centuries to fully disintegrate. Scientists still struggle to model exactly how that process will unfold.<\/p>\n One recent study projected the glacier could be losing between 180 and 200 billion tons of ice per year by 2067. That rate of ice loss would raise sea levels long before the glacier disappears.<\/p>\n What the imminent loss of the eastern ice shelf means is that one of the main things slowing that process down is about to be removed.\u00a0<\/p>\n The path to collapse<\/p>\n The glacier has been retreating with a brake on. Soon it won\u2019t have one.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t know quite how this ice shelf is going to break up, but it\u2019s definitely going to go,\u201d Larter said.<\/p>\n The doomsday scenario includes a full glacier collapse, about 26 inches (65 centimeters) of sea level rise, and widespread coastal flooding. Scientists expect that process to unfold over centuries rather than years.<\/p>\n But the direction of travel has been clear for years, and losing the eastern ice shelf is another step in that direction. One that\u2019s now, apparently, just months away.<\/p>\n The study can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scientists have been watching the Thwaites Glacier with growing dread for years. Thwaites is the largest glacier in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":484540,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[242,85,46,141],"class_list":["post-484539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484539\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/484540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}