NASA study warns world's most dangerous glacier is disintegrating – 31/01/2019

Because of its role in rising waters, it is considered the most dangerous glacier in the world. And now, a new investigation triggers the alert. The gigantic 40-square-kilometer, 300-meter-high cavity that lies at the foot of the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica confirms that this mbad of ice he disintegrates.

The results of a new study conducted by NASA highlight the need for detailed observations on the lower Antarctic glaciers to compute the speed with which the sea level will rise in response to climate change.

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The researchers hoped to find spaces between the ice and the rock at the bottom of Thwaites where the ocean water could flow and melt the glacier from underneath. The size and explosive growth rate of the new hole, however, I surprised them. It is large enough to hold 14 billion tonnes of ice and most of that ice has melted in the last three years.

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"The size of the cavity under a glacier plays an important role in the merger – said the lead author of the study, Pietro Milillo, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). As more heat and water enter the glacier, it melts faster"

"For years, we suspected that Thwaites was not well attached to the underlying rock," added Eric Rignot of the University of California and JPL. Rignot is co-author of the new study published in Science Advances. "Thanks to a new generation of satellites, we can finally see the details," he said.

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The cavity was revealed by an ice penetration radar in NASA's IceBridge operation, an air campaign launched in 2010 examines the links between the polar regions and the global climate. The researchers also used data from a constellation of synthetic aperture radars from Italian and German spacecraft. These very high resolution data can be processed by a technique called radar interferometry to reveal the evolution of the ground surface located between the images.

Thwaites is one of the most difficult places to reach on Earthbut is about to be better known than ever. The National Science Foundation of the United States and the National Environmental Research Council of the United Kingdom are preparing a five-year field project to answer the most critical questions about their processes and characteristics. The Thwaites Glacier International Collaboration will begin its field experiments next summer in the Southern Hemisphere.

The size of the state of Florida, the Thwaites Glacier, is currently responsible for about 4% of the rise in sea level around the world. It has enough ice to lift the global ocean by just over 2 centimeters and holds nearby glaciers that would raise the sea level by 2.4 centimeters if all the ice was lost.

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The enormous cavity lies beneath the main glacier trunk on the west side, the farthest from the western Antarctic Peninsula. In this region, when the tide goes up and down, the ground connection line moves back and forth over an area of ​​about 3 to 5 kilometers. The glacier has been detached from a crest in the bedrock at a constant rate of about 0.6 to 0.8 km per year since 1992. Despite this rate of steady decline in the land line, the melting rate glacier is extremely high.

Numerical models of ice caps use a fixed shape to represent a cavity under the ice, instead of allowing the cavity to change and develop. The new discovery implies that this limitation will probably make these models underestimate the speed with which Thwaites loses ice.

Source: DPA / Europa Press