A team of 32 scientists is sailing to “the place in the world that’s the hardest to get to” so they can better figure out how much and how fast seas will rise because of global warming eating away at Antarctica’s ice.
The glacier is the widest in the world and is nicknamed the “doomsday glacier” because of its massive size, comparable to the size of Florida. It faces the Amundsen Sea and may lose ice mass because of warm water.
Known as the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, (ITGC) the international team of researchers set off from Chile on a 65-day voyage to Antarctica. There, they’ll deploy Boaty McBoatface, a cute submersible, and a host of other instruments to explore what’s going on underneath the Thwaites glacier, in a mission expected to last over two months.
The glacier’s importance cannot be overemphasized. Warming seas caused by climate change make investigating the area where the Thwaites Glacier is located crucial.
To that end, the United States and the United Kingdom are in the midst of a joint $50 million mission to study Thwaites, according to the Associated Press. Not near any of the continent’s research stations, Thwaites is on Antarctica’s western half, east of the jutting Antarctic 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,” Anna Wahlin, an oceanographer from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, said Wednesday in an interview from the Research Vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer, which was scheduled to leave its port in Chile hours later. “It is configured in a way so that it’s potentially unstable. And that is why we are worried about this.”
The ITGC team has been studying the Thwaites Glacier for the past several years. Studies have revealed that warm water is rapidly carving channels deep into the ice and pushing farther inland, reports Gizmodo.
In a summary of their findings given late last year, researchers revealed that parts of the ice shelf are receding as fast as 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) per year, and the glacier could become completely unmoored from the bedrock it sits on by the time we’re ringing in the new year in 2030.
Thwaites is putting about 50 billion tons of ice into the water a year. The British Antarctic Survey says the glacier is responsible for 4 percent of global sea rise, and the conditions leading to it losing more ice are accelerating, University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos said from the McMurdo land station last month.
Oregon State University ice scientist Erin Pettit said Thwaites appears to be collapsing in three ways:
- Melting from below by ocean water.
- The land part of the glacier “is losing its grip” to the place it attaches to the seabed, so a large chunk can come off into the ocean and later melt.
- The glacier’s ice shelf is breaking into hundreds of fractures like a damaged car windshield. This is what Pettit said she fears will be the most troublesome with six-mile (10-kilometer) long cracks forming in just a year.
