Not all the news from the AGU Fall Meeting is sunshine and roses. A major topic of the conference is climate change, and the news there isn’t pretty, as expected.

In particular, researchers reported on the situation with the Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica, which has 120 kilometers of frozen coastline slowly flowing into the ocean. That outflow rate is increasing, though. Senior research scientist Ted Scambos from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) explains: Thwaites is the widest glacier in the world. It’s doubled its outflow speed within the last 30 years, and the glacier in its entirety holds enough water to raise sea level by over two feet. And it could lead to even more sea-level rise, up to 10 feet, if it draws the surrounding glaciers with it.

I don’t even know how to report on this story without being horrified. This glacier is the size of the state of Florida or the country of Britain for you EU folks.

Warmer ocean water is circulating beneath the floating portion of the glacier on the eastern side, and that water is melting the ice from underneath. This melting in turn causes the glacier to lose hold of the underwater mountain anchoring it. There are massive fractures forming, and the floating extension of the Thwaites Glacier is likely to fail in the next few years.

And deep under the ice shelf in the ocean cavity below, water that is warm by polar standards, and is also salty, is creating a chaotic zone of rugged ice and a sloping bottom surface that is melting quickly. Scambos goes on to terrify us further by noting: If Thwaites were to collapse, it would drag most of West Antarctica’s ice with it.

We need to get a handle on climate change sooner rather than later. Lives literally depend on it. I wish I was being overly dramatic, but I’m not.

More Information

CIRES press release