There is nothing better than sitting through a series of presentations about how to save the glaciers.
The news about Thwaites Glacier was the first item on the agenda of the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. This glacier is the only one you need to care about. Why choose one? Thwaites is known as the "Doomsday Glacier" and a key portion of it could lose its grip on the bedrock by the end of this decade. It is bad if it is not clear.
Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science, said on a press call that they are watching a world do things they haven't seen before.
Well, then.
Thwaites Glacier is a disaster of epic proportions, and researchers are racing to chronicle it. The glacier spills down from the ice sheet in the Amundsen Sea. To understand what is happening at Thwaites, researchers have undertaken a multi-year study that probes the glacier from above and below.
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The results have been very bad. The scientists said that parts of the floating ice shelf are moving at a rate of 1.2 miles per year. It is a bit unnerving to be standing on the ice looking at the ice sheet. You can see the horizon moving a mile a year.
The glacier has warm water underneath it. Large crevasses cutting up into the ice resulted in strange deformities in parts of the ice. The area that used to be attached to the bedrock is now a huge cavity, according to a researcher at Lewis & Clark College who has studied the glacier.
Warming water under the ice means less of it is holding fast to the ground. That can lead to more cracking and fracturing and eventually the collapse of the ice shelf. That would allow more ice to fall. One of the more stable areas where Thwaites is grounded on bedrock is undergoing rapid changes that will reduce down to near zero contact by the end of the decade, according to a scientist at Oregon State University. She wanted to study on the eastern side of the ice because it was one of the most boring parts of the glacier. She was worried that a crack in the ice could cause a fire at their field site. That wasn't an issue, but it was still an ominous sign of the state of Thwaites.
It was similar to a car windshield with a few cracks. She said that a bump causes it to shatter.
There is no repair service for ice. The floating part of the glacier holds back a basin of land ice that would cause sea-level rise if dumped into the ocean. If the ice shelf becomes unmoored, that won't happen at once. The collapse of Thwaites would set the world on a dangerous path. The researchers will continue to investigate whether we are on that trajectory or not. The state of things right now is not good.
The front of the glacier is going to change in less than a decade. The fast-flow part of Thwaites is likely to widen when bracing on the east side is gone. It may take a few decades before some of the other processes.
