The 'doomsday' glacier is on the brink of collapse

Popular Science ^ | Dec 18, 2021 | Sara Kiley Watson

[where's_the_Outrage?]

One of the ever-looming threats of climate change is sea level rise, which already threatens to displace millions of people worldwide and force them to move inland by the end of the century. A big part of the rising water levels are hotter temperatures at the poles—home to giant glaciers and ice shelves that hold crucial quantities of frozen H2O.

The Florida-sized Thwaites glacier in Antarctica, nicknamed the “doomsday glacier,” is already losing 50 billion tons of ice each year. That in itself accounts for around 4 percent of annual global sea level rise. But unpublished research shared at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting this week shows that the thinning ice shelf extending from Thwaites could shatter within the next three to five years. Behind Thwaites lies an even larger body of ice that, if the glacier melts, will be exposed to increasingly warm waters.

“Thwaites is the widest glacier in the world,” Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and lead coordinator for the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), said in a press release. “It’s doubled its outflow speed within the last 30 years, and the glacier in its entirety holds enough water to raise [global] sea levels by over two feet. And it could lead to even more sea level rise, up to 10 feet, if it draws the surrounding glaciers with it.”

[JD_UTDallas]

Events of this.magnitude only happen a few times in 100,000 years. During interglacial periods which the earth has been in an interglacial period for the last 10,000 years ice sheet collapses happen that’s by definition what makes an interglacial an interglacial. Technically earth is still in an ice age as there is still continental and alpine glaciation. There have been times in earth’s past not that far past where all the ice sheets have melted in the interglacial periods this has and no doubt will raise sea levels by 200+ feet there is absolutely nothing man can do to stop ice sheet collapses its part of earth’s climate cycles largely driven by eccentricity in earth’s orbit and the wobble of earth’s axis relative to the plane of the ecliptic. If this ice sheet goes people will have to move its that simple. It’s not type the sheet is moving that’s very much part of earth’s climate cycle its how fast and when is this sheet going to splash down so to speak.

[bramps]

I appreciate the info.