Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Thwaites Glacier is an unusually broad and vast Antarctic glacier located east of Mount Murphy, on the Walgreen Coast of Marie Byrd Land. It was initially sighted by polar researchers in 1940, mapped in 1959–1966 and officially named in 1967, after the late American glaciologist Fredrik T. Thwaites.
The Thwaites Ice Shelf is one of the biggest ice shelves in West Antarctica, though it is highly unstable and disintegrating rapidly. [2] [3] Since the 1980s, the Thwaites Glacier, nicknamed the "Doomsday glacier", [4] has had a net loss of over 600 billion tons of ice, though pinning of the Thwaites Ice Shelf has served to slow the process. [5]
Its most vulnerable parts like Thwaites Glacier, which holds about 65 cm (25 + 1 ⁄ 2 in) of sea level rise equivalent, are believed to require "centuries" to collapse entirely. [53] Thwaites' ice loss over the next 30 years would likely be around 5 mm of sea level rise between 2018 and 2050, and between 14 and 42 mm over 100 years. [40]
Scientists using ice-breaking ships and underwater robots have found the Thwaites Glacier is melting at an accelerating rate and could be on an irreversible path to collapse.
Scientists are warning the Antarctic Ice Sheet, known formally as the Thwaites Glacier, will deteriorate "further and faster" and that sea level rise triggered by the melting could impact ...
Although the glacier is replenished through snowfall, and glaciers generally accumulate more snow than they lose, the Thwaites Glacier is losing around 50 billion tons more ice than it is ...
Some named Antarctic iceshelves. Ice shelf extending approximately 6 miles into the Antarctic Sound from Joinville Island. An ice shelf is "a floating slab of ice originating from land of considerable thickness extending from the coast (usually of great horizontal extent with a very gently sloping surface), resulting from the flow of ice sheets, initially formed by the accumulation of snow ...
Scientists have looked back in time to reconstruct the past life of Antarctica’s “Doomsday Glacier.” Their findings give an alarming insight into future melting.