Study Warns Melting of 'One of the World's Most Dangerous Glaciers' Could Cause 20-Inch Sea Level Rise
New NASA-funded research warns that because of human-caused global heating, West Antarctica’s massive Thwaites Glacier is at risk of reaching a tipping point that could raise the global sea level by about 20 inches.
“After reaching the tipping point, Thwaites Glacier could lose all of its ice in a period of 150 years. That would make for a sea level rise of about half a meter (1.64 feet).”
—Hélène Seroussi, NASA
The study, published Monday in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was conducted by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the University of Washington.
Though this team focused on the Thwaites Glacier—which is about the size of Florida or Britain—the report follows several others that have raised alarm about how rapidly ice is disappearing in Antarctica, including one study from May which found that the continent’s ice sheets are thinning five times faster than they were in the 1990s.
In a statement Monday, Georgia Tech explained that researchers found “instability hidden within Antarctic ice is likely to accelerate its flow into the ocean and push sea level up at a more rapid pace than previously expected.”
The Thwaites Glacier is often called “one of the world’s most dangerous glaciers” because of its potential contributions to sea level rise. As Common Dreams reported in January, NASA scientists recently discovered a 1,000-foot deep cavity in the glacier large enough to have held about 14 billion tons of ice before it melted, which heightened concerns about the glacier’s future.
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Researchers behind the new study weren’t able to project exactly how much ice the Thwaites Glacier will lose in the next 50 to 800 years, “due to unpredictable fluctuations in climate and the need for more data,” but they factored the instability into 500 ice flow simulations for the glacier, which “together pointed to the eventual triggering of the instability,” according to the Georgia Tech statement.
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