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The dangers posed by the so-called "End of the World" glacier

2023-02-18 22:37:38Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
The dangers posed by the so-called "End of the World" glacier
glacier

Scientists have seen what is slowly eroding the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. The glacier has been nicknamed "The End of the World" due to its massive potential and sea level rise in the event of its melting. It's good news and bad news. Using a three-meter pencil-shaped robot, scientists saw a critical bright spot in Thwaites' chaotic compartment.

"The Thwaites Glacier is basically a very slow moving mass of ice that is coming off the Antarctic continent and moving into the ocean. You can imagine it as a slow flowing river. It is one of the fastest changing glaciers in Antarctica. It has the highest potential to change rapidly in the next century. And there is a lot of concern about the impact it could have on sea level rise," says Peter Davis, oceanographer, British Antarctic Survey.

Scientists had failed to observe Thwaites' critical point at first. But by lowering the Icefin robot down a thin crevasse 587 meters long, they saw how deep crevasses affect the breaking of ice, causing the greatest damage to the glacier, even more so than melting.

The findings were published in two studies in the journal Nature. They come as a result of a multi-year international research work with financial support of 50 million dollars to better understand the largest glacier in the world.

"This extreme melting is happening within the cracks and across the ice sheets, in areas we call terraces. So the issue is not how the melt is proceeding, but how it works and where it happens," says Britney Schmidt, scientist, Cornell University.

The good news is that most of the underwater area they explored is melting much more slowly than expected.

"When we went to Thwaites and looked under the glacier, we found extremely warm water. It was about a degree and a half above freezing and that should have prompted a relatively high rate of melting. But what we also noticed was that this layer of fresh water, right at the base of the ice, creates a dense slope, and it's this slope that stops heat from going from the ocean to the ice. Our computer models, they are not able to represent this layer of fresh water. So they produce or predict a much higher rate of melting than we actually observed because they don't contain the necessary physics to fully accommodate them," says Peter Davis, oceanographer, British Antarctic Survey.

The bad news is that it doesn't really change the amount of ice that breaks off the glacier and will raise sea levels, says Davis, lead author of one of the studies. Davis adds that for Thwaites Glacier, breakaway is a bigger problem than melting. The more the glacier breaks or breaks off, the more ice floats in the water.

When ice is part of a glacier, it does not raise the sea level, but when it breaks away, it adds to the overall water level, just as if you drop an ice cube into a glass, it immediately raises the water level.


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