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Scientists have looked back in time to reconstruct the past life of Antarctica’s “Doomsday Glacier” — nicknamed because its collapse could cause catastrophic sea level rise. They have discovered it started retreating rapidly in the 1940s, according to a new study that provides an alarming insight into future melting. The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is the world’s widest and roughly the size of Florida. Scientists knew it had been losing ice at an accelerating rate since the 1970s, but because satellite data only goes back a few decades, they didn’t know exactly when significant melting began. Now there is...

Ocean water is pushing miles beneath Antarctica’s “Doomsday Glacier,” making it more vulnerable to melting than previously thought, according to new research which used radar data from space to perform an X-ray of the crucial glacier. As the salty, relatively warm ocean water meets the ice, it’s causing “vigorous melting” underneath the glacier and could mean global sea level rise projections are being underestimated, according to the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica — nicknamed the “Doomsday Glacier” because its collapse could cause catastrophic sea level rise —...

Scientists have looked back in time to reconstruct the past life of Antarctica’s “Doomsday Glacier” — nicknamed because its collapse could cause catastrophic sea level rise. They have discovered it started retreating rapidly in the 1940s, according to a new study that provides an alarming insight into future melting. The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is the world’s widest and roughly the size of Florida. Scientists knew it had been losing ice at an accelerating rate since the 1970s, but because satellite data only goes back a few decades, they didn’t know exactly when significant melting began. Now there is...

Two teams of scientists say the long-feared collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun, kicking off what they say will be a centuries-long, "unstoppable" process that could raise sea levels by as much as 15 feet. "There's been a lot of speculation about the stability of marine ice sheets, and many scientists suspected that this kind of behavior is under way," Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a news release about one of the studies published Monday. "This study provides a more qualitative idea of the rates at which the collapse...

Two studies released Monday signal that five glaciers in West Antarctica are undergoing irreversible decline over the next several hundred years, signaling sea level-rise of nearly four feet. Five glaciers that feed continental ice from Antarctica into the Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean – glaciers long seen as the soft underbelly of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet – are undergoing irreversible decline, two new studies indicate.

PARIS (AFP) – Global warming may wipe out three-quarters of Europe's alpine glaciers by 2100 and hike sea levels by four metres (13 feet) by the year 3000 through melting the West Antarctic icesheet, two studies published on Sunday said. The research places the spotlight on two of the least understood aspects of climate change: how, when and where warming will affect glaciers on which many millions depend for their water, and the problems faced by generations in the far distant future. The glacier study predicts that mountain glaciers and icecaps will shrink by 15-27 percent in volume terms on...

Climate: New study slashes estimate of icecap loss PARIS (AFP) - – Estimates of the rate of ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica, one of the most worrying questions in the global warming debate, should be halved, according to Dutch and US scientists.In the last two years, several teams have estimated Greenland is shedding roughly 230 gigatonnes of ice, or 230 billion tonnes, per year and West Antarctica around 132 gigatonnes annually.Together, that would account for more than half of the annual three-millimetre (0.2 inch) yearly rise in sea levels, a pace that compares dramatically with 1.8mm (0.07 inches)...