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The Thwaites Glacier, an ice formation the size of Florida, can change the world. And the latest research shows that some of its most vulnerable spots are in greater danger than previously thought ...
The Thwaites Glacier on the vast West Antarctica Ice Sheet is commonly called the "Doomsday Glacier" because of its potential to significantly raise sea levels, inundating low-lying coastal ...
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.
At 120 km (75 mi) in width, [2] Thwaites Glacier is the single widest glacier in the world, and it has an area of 192,000 km 2 (74,000 sq mi). This makes it larger than the American state of Florida (170,000 km 2 (66,000 sq mi)), and a little smaller than the entire island of Great Britain (209,000 square kilometres (81,000 square miles)).
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]
The glacier area shrank from 3.1 km 2 (1.2 sq mi) in 1958 to 0.9 km 2 (0.35 sq mi) by 2002. Between 1850 and 1950, the Boulder Glacier on the southeast flank of Mount Baker retreated 8,700 feet (2,700 m). William Long of the United States Forest Service observed the glacier beginning to advance due to cooler/wetter weather in 1953.
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 ...
An Antarctic glacier the size of Florida is on the verge of collapse, scientists with the American Geophysical Union warned Monday, a nightmare scenario made worse by climate change that could ...