The Thwaites Glacier ice shelf is on the verge of collapse, which will cause the glacier to melt.
Thwaites, which is the size of Florida, is losing 50 billion tons of ice every year. The glacier earned its nickname because it would raise global sea levels by two feet and expose other glaciers to the same melt process.
The melting of ice from Thwaites is one of the main causes of sea-level rise.
Thwaites's eastern region is slowly melting, compared to the rest of the glacier. The glacier is held in place by an ice shelf that protects it from warm ocean waters.
The ice shelf acts like a dam. "But it's not going to last very long," said a researcher at Oregon State University at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union on Monday.
The eastern ice shelf is likely to break into hundreds of pieces within the next five years, like the shattering of your car's window, according to a report.
Once that happens, a wider stretch of ice from the Thwaites Glacier will be flowing into the ocean.
Each week, we get a new satellite image of the eastern ice shelf, and we see deeper and longer fissures.
The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), a team of nearly 100 scientists, is monitoring the ice shelf. The US National Science Foundation and the UK Natural Environmental Research Council gave Thwaites a $25 million grant to study the glacier over the next five years.
The ITGC scientists' data shows a glacier growing more volatile.
"There's going to be a dramatic change in the front of the glacier, probably within less than a decade," Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist leading the team, said during the briefing.
It may take a few decades before some of the other processes that accelerate the ice flow and the retreat take hold. It will speed up the pace and widen the dangerous part of the glacier.
Warming ocean waters are melting the eastern ice shelf. The Thwaites glacier is being pulled away from the underwater mountain by the diminishing ice.
The ice will lose its grip on the mountain in a decade. It's hard to know if the ice shelf will be shattered before that.
The eastern third of Thwaites could see triple the speed of ice loss once the ice shelf collapses. That will cause new volumes of water and ice to pour into the ocean each year.
The researchers don't know how fast that will happen. It could take decades or centuries.
It's difficult. It's unnerving to stand on the ice and see the ice sheet from one side of the horizon to the other, and it's moving at a mile a year.
The glacier is large enough to have a big impact on sea level.
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