"It is a feedback loop, a vicious cycle.". Thwaites Glacier), sometimes referred to as the Doomsday Glacier, is an unusually broad and vast Antarctic glacier flowing into the Pine Island Bay, part of the Amundsen Sea, east of Mount Murphy, on the Walgreen Coast of Marie Byrd Land Its surface speeds exceed 2 kilometres per year (1.2 miles per year) near its grounding line. Thwaites Glacier, known as the “Doomsday Glacier”, has caused alarm among scientists who warn that it is increasingly likely to live up to its nickname. The Thwaites Glacier is one of Antarctica's fastest melting glaciers. (CNN)Deep channels discovered under the Antarctic's so-called "Doomsday glacier" may be allowing warm ocean water to melt the underside of ice, according to scientists collecting data from an area crucial to understanding sea-level rise. The Thwaites Glacier, located in West Antarctica, has been called the ‘doomsday’ glacier and ‘the most important glacier’ in the world according to a group of scientists from the U.S. and UK. Doing science of this scale in such an extreme environment is not just about flying a few scientists to a remote location. This heavy salty water is carried by a deep ocean current called the Atlantic conveyor all the way down to the south Atlantic. Glaciers everywhere might be melting, but only one has earned the most terrifying nickname: the Doomsday Glacier. And when it does collapse, it could trigger the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet also. Before now, he said, the ITGC has not been able to precisely quantify sea-level rise in West Antarctica "because there was so much uncertainty about understanding the ice sheet processes and how the glaciers will over time respond.". Glaciers everywhere might be melting, but only one has earned the most terrifying nickname: the Doomsday Glacier. Ice draining from the gigantic Thwaites Glacier into the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica already accounts for about 4% of global sea-level rise, and scientists say it is highly susceptible to climate change. And once it starts to retreat, it will just keep retreating.". Jordan said that suggestions of geoengineering and blocking the channels is not logistically feasible at such a remote site. "When you think about it, we shouldn't be surprised by any of this," says Prof Vaughan as we are preparing to board the plane that will take us back to New Zealand and then home. We sit in the mess tent playing cards and drinking tea and the scientists discuss why the glacier is retreating so rapidly. And Thwaites sits like a keystone right in the centre of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet - a vast basin of ice that contains more than 3m of additional potential sea level rise. It's a little smaller than Britain, so it's absolutely massive. They need tonnes of specialist equipment and tens of thousands of litres of fuel, as well as tents and other camping supplies and food. The so-called 'doomsday glacier' could trigger 10 feet of sea-level rise if it melts. Currently, Thwaites' ice loss contributes approximately 4% to the annual rise in global sea-levels, with the potential to add 65cm in total should the whole glacier collapse. Glaciers are huge sheets of ice moving very slowly, and contain vast amounts of water. Understanding why it’s retreating so quickly has been a challenge, but glaciologists have recently discovered that the glacier is now generating its own seismic activity when it calves (breaks off … Home Science Why Scientists Are So Worried About Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier Why Scientists Are So Worried About Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier. Read about our approach to external linking. The plane flies up over the camp and directly north, out towards the ocean. So, the more the glacier melts, the more quickly the ice in it is likely to flow. The reason the scientists are so worried about Thwaites is because of that downward sloping submarine bed. .css-14iz86j-BoldText{font-weight:bold;}The images are murky at first. Thwaites Glacier is one of Antarctica’s largest contributors to sea level rise from Antarctica. An increase in sea level of 50cm would mean the storm that used to come every thousand years will now come every 100 years. Western Antarctica, however, is very different. A simpler solution would be to "tackle climate change.". As the members of the drilling team set up their equipment, I help out with a seismic survey of the bed beneath the glacier. Hits: 3. "At the end, we will be able to say to governments and policy-makers, this is what's going to happen ... we will actually have a proper, well-constrained estimate of what's going to happen to Thwaites Glacier," said Jordan. The cavities hidden beneath the ice shelf are likely to be the route through which warm ocean water passes underneath the ice shelf up to the grounding line, they said. They have confirmed that the deep circumpolar warm water is getting under the glacier and have collected huge amounts of data. Thwaites glacier is larger the England and could drive global sea levels up by two feet (60cm) if it were to totally collapse. For starters, its density contains two-feet of potential sea level. Basically Thwaites glacier is right on the edge of collapse. But drilling a 30cm hole through almost half a mile of ice at the front of the most remote glacier in the world is not easy. As the glacier retreats back, yet more ice is exposed. "The deep Antarctic circumpolar water is only a handful of degrees warmer than the water above it - a degree or two above 0C - but that's warm enough to light this glacier up," says David Holland, an oceanographer with New York University and one of the lead scientists at the grounding zone camp. Heat is energy, and energy drives the weather and ocean currents. Glaciers everywhere might be melting, but only one has earned the most terrifying nickname: the Doomsday Glacier. Icefin has reached the point at which the warm ocean water meets the wall of ice at the front of the mighty Thwaites glacier - the point where this vast body of ice begins to melt. "What we are seeing here in the Antarctic is just another huge system responding in its own way.". The Thwaites Glacier is one of the largest glaciers in Antarctica, and it is melting at an alarming rate. The scientists at the grounding zone camp plan to use hot water to drill their hole through the ice. They want to drill down through almost half a mile of ice right at the point where the glacier goes afloat. Deep channels discovered under the Antarctic's so-called "Doomsday glacier" may be allowing warm ocean water to melt the underside of ice, according to … The glacier is roughly the size of Britain or Florida and already contributes to 4 per cent of sea-level rise each year. Glaciologists have described Thwaites as the "most important" glacier in the world, the "riskiest" glacier, even the "doomsday" glacier. A look at maps of the region’s ice loss makes this clear, says Nick Holschuh, a […] The Icefin team, along with 40 or so other scientists, are part of the .css-yidnqd-InlineLink:link{color:#3F3F42;}.css-yidnqd-InlineLink:visited{color:#696969;}.css-yidnqd-InlineLink:link,.css-yidnqd-InlineLink:visited{font-weight:bolder;border-bottom:1px solid #BABABA;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-yidnqd-InlineLink:link:hover,.css-yidnqd-InlineLink:visited:hover,.css-yidnqd-InlineLink:link:focus,.css-yidnqd-InlineLink:visited:focus{border-bottom-color:currentcolor;border-bottom-width:2px;color:#B80000;}@supports (text-underline-offset:0.25em){.css-yidnqd-InlineLink:link,.css-yidnqd-InlineLink:visited{border-bottom:none;-webkit-text-decoration:underline #BABABA;text-decoration:underline #BABABA;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-skip-ink:none;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;text-underline-offset:0.25em;}.css-yidnqd-InlineLink:link:hover,.css-yidnqd-InlineLink:visited:hover,.css-yidnqd-InlineLink:link:focus,.css-yidnqd-InlineLink:visited:focus{-webkit-text-decoration-color:currentcolor;text-decoration-color:currentcolor;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:2px;text-decoration-thickness:2px;color:#B80000;}}International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, a five-year, $50m (£38m) joint UK-US effort to understand why it is changing so rapidly. Over the past three decades, the rate of ice loss from Thwaites, which is about the size of Great Britain or the US state of Florida, and its neighboring glaciers has increased more than five-fold. According to the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, the amount of ice flowing out of the Thwaites and nearby glaciers has nearly doubled over the last 30 years. A massive one that poses such risk it's been branded the 'Doomsday Glacier". It is massive - roughly the size of Britain. Suddenly a shadow looms above, an overhanging cliff of dirt-encrusted ice. By Justin RowlattChief Environment correspondent. The surface area of each one gets bigger and bigger - providing ever more ice for the water to melt. It already accounts for 4% of world sea level rise each year - a huge figure for a single glacier - and satellite data show that it is melting increasingly rapidly. The team collected data from the glacier and adjoining Dotson and Crosson ice shelves from January to March 2019. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier has been called the "Doomsday Glacier." Updated 12:19 PM ET, Wed September 9, 2020. I've been in Antarctica five weeks before I finally board the red British Antarctic Survey Twin Otter that takes me to the front of the glacier. As we fly out over the front of the glacier, I realise with a shock just how fragile a fingerhold it is. Thwaites' size and melt rate have led to it being dubbed the "Doomsday Glacier" What's likely to happen in the near future? Once scientists can demonstrate the expected sea-level rise relating to West Antarctica, he said, they will have more evidence when calling for action to mitigate climate change. I will be camping with the team at what is known as the grounding zone. "I think this is a big step towards helping understand that," he added. Officially called the Thwaites … Why Scientists Are So Worried About Antarctica's Doomsday Glacier - Flipboard Evidence from other glaciers shows that if you increase the amount of warm water that is reaching the glacier the ice pump works much faster. Officially called the Thwaites Glacier, this mass of ice nestled into the western edge of Antarctica is melting at an alarming rate. The scale is staggering and explains why Thwaites is already such an important component of world sea level rise, but I am shocked to discover there is another process that could accelerate its retreat even more. .css-8h1dth-Link{font-family:ReithSans,Helvetica,Arial,freesans,sans-serif;font-weight:700;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;color:#FFFFFF;}.css-8h1dth-Link:hover,.css-8h1dth-Link:focus{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}Read about our approach to external linking. The ice in East Antarctica is thick - more than a mile thick on average - but it rests on high ground and only creeps sluggishly to the sea. © 2020 BBC. The world took notice earlier this month when temperatures there hit nearly 70 degrees. This video on the doomsday glacier explains why. The distances are so great they needed to set up another camp halfway down the glacier so the planes could refuel. Thwaites Glacier, sometimes referred to as the Doomsday Glacier is an unusually broad and vast Antarctic glacier flowing into the Pine Island Bay. Jordan said the next phase was to incorporate the data from the channels, some of them 2,600 feet (800 meters) deep, into simulations of how the ice sheet will respond into the future. They are almost half way down through the ice. If you increase that to a metre then that millennial storm is likely to come once a decade. Thwaites is not going to vanish overnight - the scientists say it will take decades, possibly more than a century. The area surveyed had been hidden beneath part of the floating ice shelf extending from Thwaites Glacier, which broke off in 2002, and was then often inaccessible due to thick sea-ice cover. Then smaller planes - an elderly Dakota and a couple of Twin Otters - ferried the people and supplies on to the field camps, hundreds of miles down the glacier towards the sea. Sea water is salty and dense which makes it heavy. That association, the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, examines the glacier by means of icebreaker sends that can get through thick ice sheets. The principle is simple - you heat the water with a bank of boilers to just below boiling point and then spray it onto the ice, melting your way down. I look back and see the wheel at the top of the drill turning, the black hose spooling out steadily. Scientists from the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) collected data by flying over the glacier in a British Antarctic Survey (BAS) Twin Otter aircraft and mapping the sea floor from the US Antarctic Program icebreaker RV Nathaniel B. Palmer. Thwaites Glacier – what is it and why should we care? Two ice-hardened ships docked alongside an ice cliff at the foot of the Antarctic Peninsula during the last Antarctic summer. Thwaites Glacier, a huge glacier in the Antarctic, is often called the Doomsday Glacier. The high cliffs at the ice front of Thwaites Glacier, which accounts for about 4% of global sea-level rise. But warm water transforms the process, according to the scientists. It blows huge drifts of snow into the camp, swamping the equipment, and all the work stops. The find was made possible thanks to an underwater robot called Icefin, which headed more than 700 metres below the ice of the Thwaites Glacier. In other words, if Thwaites glacier melts, two feet is immediately added to the ocean’s sea levels. Icefin, the robot submarine, has managed to make five missions, taking a host of measurements in the water beneath the glacier and recording some extraordinary images. The project represents the biggest and most complex scientific field programme in Antarctic history. Research and graphics by Alison Trowsdale, Becky Dale Lilly Huynh, Irene de la Torre. Melt water is fresh and therefore relatively light. "The fear is these processes will just accelerate," she says. West Antarctica is the stormiest part of the world's stormiest continent. … It took more than a dozen flights by the US Antarctic programme's fleet of huge ski-equipped Hercules cargo planes just to get the scientists and some of their cargo to the project's main staging post in the middle of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Snow on the ice runway delays my flight from New Zealand to McMurdo, the main US research station in Antarctica. If the glacier were to melt, it would drain a mass of water the size of Great Britain. "And also, we know that its bed dips down, and it gets deeper and deeper underneath the ice sheet, which means that, theoretically, you can get a process called marine ice sheet instability. Most glaciers that flow into the sea have what is known as an "ice pump". That's worrying news for coastal cities. You may be surprised that so little is known about such an important glacier - I certainly was when I was invited to cover the work of the team. It will take years to process all the information the team has gathered and incorporate the findings into the models that are used to project future sea level rise. The scientists had told me that we had been camped on what is basically a small bay of ice protected by a horseshoe of raised ground. I was supposed to leave Antarctica at the end of December but all the delays mean the drilling only begins on 7 January. Glaciologists have described Thwaites as the "most important" glacier in the world, the "riskiest" glacier, even the "doomsday" glacier. They say what is happening here is down to the complex interplay of climate, weather and ocean currents. "They already have in the Arctic," says Prof Vaughan with a sigh. Its rate of loss has doubled in the past three decades, earning it the moniker “doomsday glacier.”. The so-called Thwaites 'doomsday glacier' in Western Antarctica is the size of Britain and is known to be melting at an alarming rate. Glaciers everywhere might be melting, but only one has earned the most terrifying nickname: the Doomsday Glacier. Here it becomes part of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, flowing deep - a third of a mile (530m) - below a layer of much colder water. Some go so far as to term it the Doomsday glacier. They need 10,000 litres of water, which means melting 10 tonnes of snow. It wants to "smoosh out," explains Dr Riverman. This is the first of a whole catalogue of delays and disruptions. But sea level has a huge effect on the severity of storm surges, says Prof David Vaughan, the director of science at the British Antarctic Survey. A team of drivers in specialist snow vehicles then dragged it more than a thousand miles across the ice sheet through some of the most inhospitable terrain and weather on earth. There is enough water locked up in it to raise world sea level by more than half a metre. Ever-increasing carbon dioxide levels are putting a lot more heat into the atmosphere and the oceans. "It'll be the most southerly jacuzzi in the world," jokes Paul Anker, a British Antarctic Survey drilling engineer. A view of the sea ice from the Nathaniel B. Palmer icebreaker on the way to Thwaites Glacier. All the delays mean there are just a few weeks of the Antarctic summer left before the weather starts to get really bad. It takes the science teams weeks just to get to their field camps. It is a bit like cutting slices from the sharp end of a wedge of cheese. Thwaites Glacier covers around 74,000 square miles and is particularly susceptible to climate and ocean changes. The US research ship at the ice front, in a photo captured from a drone. The glacier holds two feet of sea level but more importantly, it is the "backstop" for four other glaciers which holds an additional 10 to 13 feet of sea level rise. Officially called the Thwaites Glacier, this mass of ice nestled into the western edge of Antarctica is melting at an alarming rate. Some of it has been around for millions of years. But worse more, Thwaites glacier is stopping four other glaciers from collapsing. 5 March 2020. Images show massive Antarctic change in just 9 days, Greenland's ice sheet melted faster than ever before in 2019, study says. If they melted, they could destabilize the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which has the potential to contribute about 10 feet to global sea level rise. Exceptional sea-ice break up in early 2019 enabled the icebreaker to survey more than 2,000 square kilometers of sea floor at the glacier's ice front. November 13, 2020 admin Science 0. Elsewhere, there are cliffs of ice, some of which rise up almost a mile from the sea bed. Increase the amount of energy in the system, he says, and inevitably big global processes are going to change. Glaciers everywhere might be melting, but only one has earned the most terrifying nickname: the Doomsday Glacier. The approaching loss of the Thwaites Glacier is troubling to such an extent that the US and UK made a worldwide office to examine it. It's been described as the "Doomsday" glacier … It is not unusual to have hurricane force winds as well as very low temperatures. As the Gulf Stream cools between Greenland and Iceland, the water sinks. The deep warm circumpolar water travels all the way around the continent but has been increasingly encroaching on the icy edge of West Antarctica. The higher the ice cliff, she says, the more "smooshing" the glacier wants to do. There is no mistaking the epic forces at work here, slowly tearing, ripping and shattering the ice. The front of the glacier is almost 100 miles wide (160km) and is collapsing into the sea at up to two miles (3km) a year. Story at a glance. The Thwaites Glacier is...a glacier. At one stage, the entire season's research is on the point of being cancelled because storms stop all flights to West Antarctica from McMurdo for 17 consecutive days. The surface water in Antarctica is very cold, just above -2C degrees, the freezing point of salt water. It is a part of the Amundsen Sea, east of Mount Murphy, on the Walgreen Coast of Marie Byrd Land. We are told we cannot delay our flights off the continent any longer and must leave on the supply plane that is due to arrive at the camp in an hour or so. They are camped on the ice above the point where the glacier meets the ocean water, and have the most ambitious task of all. Sediment sweeps past the camera as Icefin, a bright yellow remotely operated robot submarine, moves tentatively forward under the ice. Dr Kiya Riverman, a glaciologist at the University of Oregon, drills down with an ice auger - a large spiral stainless-steel drill bit - and sets small explosive charges. The ice in Antarctica holds 90% of the world's fresh water, and 80% of that ice is in the eastern part of the continent. Photographs by Jemma Cox and David Vaughan. In fact, virtually the whole bed is way below sea level. By then we have been joined by some of the scientists. If Thwaites were to collapse, it could lead to an increase in sea levels of around 25 inches (64 centimeters) -- and the researchers are trying to find out how soon this is likely to happen. They will use the hole to get access to the sea water that is melting the glacier to find out where it is from and why it is attacking the glacier so vigorously. The British Antarctic Survey's contribution was an epic overland journey that brought in hundreds of tonnes of fuel and cargo. At the moment, the eastern side of the ice shelf is … Thwaites and its neighbor, the Pine Island Glacier, are among those in West Antarctica most influenced by the climate crisis. The ice is about -25C (-13F) so the hole is liable to freeze over and the whole process is dependent on the vagaries of the weather. If it weren't for the ice, it would be deep ocean with a few islands. The Antarctic, is often called the Thwaites glacier is stopping four other glaciers from.! 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