The Thwaites glacier is shown in a 2020 photo by the British Antarctic Survey. A team of scientists will sail to the Thwaites glacier in January of 2021, to figure out how much and how fast seas will rise because of global warming. The British Antarctic Survey has a credit.
A team of scientists are sailing to the place in the world that is the hardest to get to so they can figure out how much and how fast seas will rise because of global warming.
The Thwaites glacier faces the Amundsen Sea and may eventually lose large amounts of ice because of warm water. The "doomsday glacier" is named because of how much ice it has and how much seas could rise if it all melted.
The United States and the United Kingdom are in the middle of a $50 million project to study Thwaites, the widest glacier in the world. Thwaites is not near any of the continent's research stations, but it is on the western half of the peninsula, which used to be the area scientists worried most about.
"Thwaites is the main reason I would say that we have so large an uncertainty in the projections of future sea level rise and that is because it's a very remote area, difficult to reach," said Anna Wahlin, an oceanographer from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. It's potentially unstable because it's configured in a way. We are worried about this because of that.
Thwaites puts 50 billion tons of ice into the water each year. The University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos said from the McMurdo land station last month that the conditions leading to the loss of ice are getting worse.
The Thwaites glacier is shown in a photo provided by the British Antarctic Survey. A team of scientists will sail to the Thwaites glacier in January of 2021, to figure out how much and how fast seas will rise because of global warming. The British Antarctic Survey has a credit.
Thwaites appears to be collapsing in three different ways.
The ocean water is melting from below.
A large chunk of the glacier can come off into the ocean and melt if the land is lost.
The glacier's ice shelf is breaking into hundreds of cracks. This is the one that she fears will be the most troublesome, with six-mile (10-kilometer) long cracks forming in just a year.
The key ice-water interface at Thwaites has never been stepped on before. A team of people explored the area using a robotic ship but never made it to land.
The crowdsource named the drone that could go further under the area of Thwaites that protrudes over the ocean, after the larger robot ship Boaty McBoatface.
Scientists on the ship will be measuring water temperature, sea floor and ice thickness. They'll look at cracks in the ice, how the ice is structured and tag seals on islands off the glacier.
Thwaites looks different from other ice shelves. It looks like a bunch of pieces that have been pressed together. It is clear that this is not a solid piece of ice like the other ice shelves are. This was more jagged and scarred.
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The Thwaites glacier was retrieved from the 'doomsday' glacier on January 6th, 2022.
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