The Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is melting at an accelerating rate

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Scientists using ice-breaking ships and underwater robotshave found the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is melting at an acceleratingrate and could be on an irreversible path to collapse, spelling catastrophe forglobal sea level rise.

A six-year investigation into the vast Thwaites glacier in Antarctica has concluded with a grim outlook on its future. Often dubbed the “doomsday glacier”, this huge mass of ice is comparable in size to Britain or Florida and its collapse alone would raise sea levels by 65 centimetres. Worse still, this is expected to trigger a more widespread loss of the ice sheet covering West Antarctica, causing a calamitous sea level rise of 3.3 metres and threatening cities like New York, Kolkata and Shanghai.

Though the glacier is in anextremely remote and difficult area, the International Thwaites GlacierCollaboration (ITGC), a joint UK-US research programme, has deployed 100scientists there over the past six years, using planes, ships and underwaterrobots to study the dynamics of this ice in detail.

Marine ice cliff instability is a relatively new concept proposed by scientists in the past decade. Many of the glaciers around Antarctica have huge floating extensions called ice shelves that buttress the glacier and slow its ice flow into the ocean. With the climate warming, some of these floating extensions have collapsed, sometimes very rapidly, in the span of a few weeks or months. If Thwaites’ ice shelf were to collapse, it would expose a very tall ice cliff facing the ocean along its 75-mile (120-kilometer) front. There is only so much force that ice can sustain, so if the cliff is too tall, it will collapse into the ocean. Once that happens, a new ice cliff farther back would be exposed, and the new cliff would be even taller because it is farther inland. The theory of marine ice cliff instability suggests that if the cliffs collapse quickly enough, that could have a domino effect of ever-higher ice cliffs collapsing one after the other.

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