Newly discovered large fissures on an Antarctic block of ice the size of Florida, known as the Doomsday glacier, mean its collapse is likely within five years, resulting in devastating sea-level rises worldwide.
The Thwaites glacier in western Antarctica is now occasionally mentioned as a Doomsday Glacier; it offers the potential to raise sea levels once it melts.
The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) said:’is thinning rapidly, has already retreated over eight miles, and has doubled in speed, in the last five decades’
A team of US scientists reported this week at an American Geophysical Union meeting that the fractures are forming at the eastern ice shelf underpinning a third of the glacier.
It’s crucial to have a clearer picture of how the glacier will behave in the next 100 years, said Thwaites.
“If this floating ice shelf breaks apart, the Thwaites Glacier will accelerate, and its contribution to sea level rise will increase by as much as 25%,” the scientists wrote, adding the ice shelf is likely to break apart in “as little as five years.”
ITGC’s lead scientist, Professor Ted Scambos, said a breakdown of Thwaites would take ‘it would drag most of West Antarctica’s ice with it’.
“There is going to be dramatic change in the front of the glacier, probably in less than a decade. Both published and unpublished studies point in that direction,” Ted Scambos, US chief executive of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, told the BBC on Tuesday.
Holy.
Shit.
Five.
Years.“Thwaites, an ice sheet the size of *Florida*, is likely to break apart in the next 5 years or so…”
https://t.co/8ewwjB8Npc— John Gibbons (@think_or_swim) December 13, 2021
