World · 18 d ago
Antarctica's Thwaites glacier is melting faster than thought, study finds
Added to sea levels by 2100
30 mm
Warm seawater pushing under the glacier could make it add 30 mm to sea levels by 2100, double current estimates, even without more warming. The study, by University of California researchers with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, appears in Nature Communications.
How warm water gets under the ice
tidal pumping
The models show seawater lifting and lowering the ice in a process called tidal pumping, which lets warm water reach deep under the glacier and melt it.
Chance the glacier unpins by 2100
60 %
The study puts at 60 per cent the chance that Thwaites comes loose from the Mouginot Ridge, the undersea bedrock that steadies it, by the end of the century.
Thwaites, about the size of Senegal at 192,000 square kilometres, already accounts for around four per cent of global sea-level rise. Experts say more studies are needed to predict how much ice it will lose.
