T here is a reason Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier is often referred to by its supervillain moniker. ‘Doomsday Glacier’ better sums up

What New 'Doomsday' Thwaites Glacier Research Tells Us

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2023-03-17 03:30:02

T here is a reason Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier is often referred to by its supervillain moniker. ‘Doomsday Glacier’ better sums up the consequences should the Florida-size slab of ice collapse due to rising temperatures: a global sea level rise of more than 2 ft., enough to wipe out low-lying island nations and many of the world’s major coastal cities. But while drastic, the projected timeline for such a melt, over the course of a century or more, offered some comfort—time to figure out a solution, or at least adapt. A recently completed field study, undertaken by the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), a five-year, $50 million joint U.S. and U.K. mission, however, just made that timeline harder to predict.

The Thwaites Glacier works kind of like a cork at the end of a frozen river that’s slowly funneling snow and ice from interior Antarctica to the ocean. As long as the cork is in place, the accumulated ice doesn’t move and most of that precipitation stays safely bottled up on land. But should Thwaites break up, it would allow the frozen river to flow into the ocean at a much more rapid pace, leading to rising sea levels.