May 22, 2024
Inside the front section of my local newspaper, I found a USA Today article on a new study released Monday about the rapid melting of an Antarctic glacier. The Thwaites Glacier is part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and is the most unstable and fastest changing glacier in the world. New research for the first time showed visible evidence of the warm sea water pumping under the glacier. Lead author Eric Rignot, of the University of California, Irvine, said there is more seawater flowing into the glacier than was previously thought, making it “more sensitive to ocean warming, and more likely to fall apart as the ocean gets warmer.” As the glacier melts it could cause ocean levels to rise as much as 2 feet (60 cm). Even more, the glacier serves as a natural dam for other glacial ice in West Antarctica which if released could raise ocean levels as much as 10 feet (3 m). A rise of this magnitude would place many of the world’s coastal cities underwater. According to the study, it “will gravely impact populations in low-lying areas like Vancouver (British Columbia), Florida, Bangladesh, and low-lying Pacific Islands”. The study on the Thwaites Glacier was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
When I looked online, I found Thwaites Glacier is an unusually broad and vast Antarctic glacier located east of Mount Murphy, on the Walgreen Coast of Marie Byrd Land. It was initially sighted by polar researchers in 1940 and mapped between 1959 to 1966. The glacier was officially named in 1967 after the late American glaciologist Fredrik T. Thwaites. The glacier flows into Pine Island Bay in the Amundsen Sea at surface speeds which exceed 1.2 miles (2 km) per year at its grounding line. Like many other parts of the of the Earth’s surface where water is in solid form (cryosphere), Thwaites has been adversely affected by climate change and provides one of the more notable examples of the retreat of glaciers since 1850. Since the 1980’s, Thwaites and Pine Island Glacier have been described as the “weak underbelly” of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, in part because they seem vulnerable to irreversible retreat and collapse even under relatively little warming. Theoretical studies of the stability of marine ice sheets and observations of large changes on these two glaciers suggest that if they were to go, the entire ice sheet is likely to eventually follow.
On March 15, 2002, the National Ice Center reported a major calving event took place when an iceberg named B-22 broke off from the Thwaites Glacier. This iceberg was about 53 miles (85 km) long by 40 miles (65 km) wide with a total area of 2,120 miles2 (5,490 km2), or comparable to the US state of Rhode Island. While most of the iceberg broke up quickly, the largest piece (B-22A), with an area of around 1,158-1⁄2 miles2 (3,000 km2) or “twice the size of Houston, Texas”, drifted near the glacier even as the rest of the glacier tongue continued to break up. In 2012, the iceberg got stuck on seafloor, 33 miles (53 km) from the ice tongue, where its presence had some stabilizing impact on the rest of the glacier. The iceberg started moving again in October 2022 and rapidly drifted to the northwest. Lasting 20 years, it is likely to end up as one of the longest-lived icebergs in history.
THOUGHTS: When I blogged about the Thwaites Glacier last year, I mentioned it has been dubbed the Doomsday Glacier by some. Since 1947 the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have maintained The Doomsday Clock as a symbol that represents the likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe. The clock is a metaphor (not a prediction) for the threat to humanity from unchecked scientific and technological advances. These predictions are now mostly driven by climate change. I can imagine a T-Rex looking up 66 million years ago and saying, “Oh look, another pretty comet!” Act for all. Change is coming and it starts with you.
A travelers odyssey 