The Doomsday Glacier is in rough shape, and it’s not called the Doomsday Glacier for nothing. Photo: NASA/Wikimedia Commons
Unless you’ve been living under a rock with your eyes squeezed shut and your fingers in your ears, you’ve heard of the ominously named “Doomsday glacier.” A recent study published on May 20 on Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a dire warning of its likely future.
The Doomsday glacier actually called the Thwaites glacier, but it got its nickname because it holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by two to 10 feet, depending on which research you’re reading. It’s enormous in size, about 80 miles wide, and it’s been the focus of worry for years.
In 2019, NASA released a report detailing a large cavity that had appeared at the bottom of the Thwaites Glacier. About two-thirds the size of the area of Manhattan and almost 1,000-feet tall, it was a harbinger of the possible fate of the glacier.
Not only does it hold all that ice within itself, but it serves as a sort of backstop for the glaciers that sit behind it.
The new study found that warm seawater is pumping underneath it, causing rapid melting.
“Thwaites is the most unstable place in the Antarctic,” said Christine Dow, a glacier expert at the University of Waterloo who co-authored the study, in a press release detailing their findings. “The worry is that we are underestimating the speed that the glacier is changing, which would be devastating for coastal communities around the world.”
Using data from the Finnish ICEYE satellite, researchers looked at images of the glacier over time. They found that the the whole thing is moving up and down as the tides move, which led them to the conclusion that seawater is coming in from below. The worry is that in the next decade or two, sea level rise could enter into catastrophic territory.
“Ice melts intensely when it first touches seawater,” wrote Splinter.com. “…The glacier is situated in a basin. To date, the ocean water has only touched the rim of it. But the researchers predict it may only take 10 to 20 years before the glacier retreats into the deeper part of the basin, at which point glacier melt will likely speed up even more.”
Although the scientists are still diligently working to make sea level rise estimates that are even more accurate than the ones we’re currently working with, the new finding show that there’s a solid change that the melt starts happening “much faster than anticipated by current models.”
