NASA study warns world's most dangerous glacier is disintegrating

The size of the state of Florida, Thwaites Glacier is considered the most dangerous in the world, because its impact on the rise of the sea level is very high. Now, a NASA investigation has warned that this mbad of ice It is disintegrating.

According to the investigation, there would be a cavity of 40 square kilometers and 300 meters high which grows in the bottom of the block, located in the West of Antarctica, would reinforce this theory.

Scientists have stressed the need to observe in detail the lower part of the Antarctic glaciers because can calculate the speed with which the sea level will go up, in response to global warming.

However, NASA experts expected to find under the Thwaites only a few gaps between the ice and the bottom, where the ocean water can sink and melt. Upon discovering this new hole, they were surprised and triggered all the alarms.

This cavity is large enough to hold up to 14,000 million tons of ice: a large part of it melted in the last three years.

This could be discovered through an ice penetration radar, which were used in the NASA IceBridge operation. The campaign began in 2010 and examines the links between the polar regions and the global climate. This very high resolution data can be processed by a technique called radar interferometry, which reveals the displacement of the ground surface between images.

Interest in Thwaites is not recent, but it's one of the great mysteries of Antarctica. 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.

This glacier is responsible for about 4% of sea level rise: it can lift the global ocean by just over two centimeters. In turn, it contains nearby glaciers that would raise the level to 2.4 centimeters if all the ice was lost.