Thwaites Glacier, What’s the Fuss
Gravity is Not Our Friend This Time
Published in The EarthSphere Blog
A flurry of news reports on Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier reached the headlines recently. The Glacier, also dubbed the “Doomsday Glacier” by some of the more dramatic renditions of the story, is a huge chunk of ice about the size of Florida. But that description doesn’t do it justice. Florida is just a flat piece of land perched at sea level (or lower). If parts of Florida rose 4000 feet above sea level, we would get a better picture of the volume of ice in the Thwaites Glacier. Perhaps a better way to envision this mother lode of ice is through the two feet of global sea-level rise it would cause by melting.
Recent revelations about the threat posed by the Thwaites Glacier are not new. The show has already started, and we are tuning in midstream. Since 2000, the Glacier has shed a trillion tons of ice into the world’s oceans. The meltwater from this single Glacier accounts for about four percent of the planet’s seal-level rise each year.
But all I’ve said so far is old news. The new fuss concerns what Ron DeSantis might call left-wing stuff; scientific research to be precise. It’s true, scientists have been poking around investigating both the obvious and not so obvious. Observing ice melting on the top of the Glacier…
