The demise of part of the huge Thwaites Glacier would hasten sea-level rise.
Giant fractures in the floating ice of Antarctica’s massive Thwaites Glacier — a fast-melting formation that has become an icon of climate change — could shatter part of the shelf within five years, research suggests. If that happens, in what had been considered a relatively stable part of Thwaites, the glacier could release an armada of icebergs and begin flowing much faster into the ocean, funnelling ice that had been resting on land into the sea, where it would contribute to sea-level rise.
For decades, scientists have carefully tracked changes in the Thwaites Glacier, which already loses around 50 billion tonnes of ice each year and causes 4% of global sea-level rise. The recently identified fractures are deep, fast-moving cracks in Thwaites’s eastern ice shelf . They have appeared in satellite images over the past few years and their growth seems to be accelerating.
“I visualize it somewhat similar to that car window where you have a few cracks that are slowly propagating, and then suddenly you go over a bump in your car and the whole thing just starts to shatter in every direction,” said Erin Pettit, a glaciologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, on 13 December at the American Geophysical Union meeting. If Thwaites’s eastern ice shelf collapses, ice in this region could flow up to three times faster into the sea, Pettit says.
“We have been expecting that ice shelf to fail, and that’s one of the reasons that there has been such a coordinated international effort to study Thwaites — it’s big and important, but it’s also been clearly poised on the brink of change,” says Kirsty Tinto, a geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, who has studied the glacier. The latest work, she says, reveals more about how ice shelves fail.
Earlier this year, members of the Thwaites collaboration reported that the glacier is becoming unstuck from that mountain, causing cracking and fracturing across other parts of the ice shelf
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