Earth’s inner heat evaporates from Antarctica’s ‘doomsday glacier’, study finds

Technology

18:24 GMT 21.08.2021(updated at 6:49 p.m. GMT on 08/21/2021) Get a short url

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A collapse of the glacier in the ocean would cause global sea level to rise by about 65 centimeters.

A new study suggests that the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, which has been melting since the 1980s and contributed 4% of “the annual global sea level rise during this period”, may not only be declining due to of global warming, Live Science reports.

According to the outlet, the authors of the new research established that the earth’s crust under East Antarctica is significantly thicker than under West Antarctica, with the Thwaites Glacier – sometimes referred to as the Doomsday Glacier – therefore being subjected to more geothermal heat than its counterparts on the other side of the frozen continent.

“Our measurements show that where the earth’s crust is only 17 to 25 kilometers thick, a geothermal heat flux of up to 150 milliwatts per square meter can occur under the Thwaites Glacier,” said Ricarda Dziadek, a geophysicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), Helmholtz. Center for Polar and Marine Research and lead author of the study.

As Karsten Gohl, geologist and co-author of the AWI study, explained, large amounts of geothermal heat can cause “the bottom of the glacier bed to no longer freeze completely” or the formation of a “constant film of water on its surface “- both of these conditions can” significantly “accelerate the loss of ice from the glacier.

If the Thwaites Glacier collapsed completely into the ocean, media warned it would cause global sea level to rise by around 65 centimeters.

In addition, the possible disappearance of the glacier, which would no longer “clog the edge of the West Antarctic ice sheet like a cork in a wine bottle”, would accelerate the loss of ice in the region and cause “a rise in the level. of the sea without precedent ”.