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The melting of Antarctic ice and climate change will contribute to rising sea levels worldwide over the next 150 years. The Thwaites Antarctic Glacier is at the forefront of this warning as it slowly collapses into the Atlantic Ocean. Scientists who have been studying this rapidly deteriorating part of Antarctica fear that Thwaites' instability will not continue without additional global warming. And if the Florida-sized glacier disintegrates in the ocean, the sea level should increase by 50 cm.
The results were presented this week (July 8th) by the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Assistant Professor Alex Robel, who led the Antarctic Ice Melt study at the Georgia Tech School of Earth Sciences and Atmosphere, warned of the consequences.
He said, "If you trigger this instability, you do not need to continue forcing the ice sheet by raising the temperature.
"It will continue on its own and that's the concern.
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"Climatic variations will always be important after this tipping point, as they will determine the speed at which the ice will move."
In the last six years alone, at least five Antarctic glaciers have doubled their melting speed.
According to the US National Science Foundation (NSF), satellite imagery has shown disturbing signs of Thwaites ice loss since the 1990s.
Rates have doubled, the Thwaites Glacier being one of the major contributors to sea level rise.
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The NSF said in a report that Thwaites alone accounts for 10% of the sea level rise in the world.
New NSF studies on the endangered glacier have shown that Thwaites poses "the greatest risk of sea level rise" because of the changes already well underway.
The foundation argued that "major and irreversible changes" are possible in the system over decades or even centuries.
Helene Seroussi, a NASA scientist who collaborated on the Antarctic study, said, "After reaching the critical point, the Thwaites Glacier could lose all its ice in 150 years.
READ MORE: NASA warns that "rapid melting" of glaciers has doubled
"That would make a sea level rise of about half a meter."
The Antarctic ice contains almost eight times more water than Greenland and 50 times more than all the mountain glaciers in the world.
As ice melts and crumbles in the oceans, the amount of water present rises on coastal areas, threatening floods around the world.
By the end of this century, sea level is expected to increase by 60 cm (2 feet).
Professor Robel said, "In a hundred years, you want to put in place critical infrastructure to withstand the upper limit of potential sea-level scenarios.
"It can mean building your water treatment plants and your nuclear reactors in the worst case, which could be a sea level rise in Thwaites Glacier alone, which is a huge difference."
The researchers published their troubling findings on July 8 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Antarctic study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the NASA Space Agency.
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