The British Mission of Antarctica (BAS), the oldest and most organized scientific community in Antarctica, has held a new to study on the giant Thwaites Glacier located in West Antarctica and is better known as the “Glacier of the Apocalypse”, since its possible collapse will cause a chain disaster by raising sea levels on the one hand, and at the same time destabilizing and dragging its neighbors with them with glaciers.
Thwaites has an area of 192,000 square kilometres, or about the size of Great Britain or the US state of Florida. It has been established that the glacier is melting, and indeed at a rapid rate, causing concern. There are ongoing studies and observations of Thwaites by ground-based, airborne and satellite instruments. Previous studies, some of which BAS has carried out alone or in collaboration with other scientific missions, have indicated that if Thwaites were to melt, global sea levels could rise by half to two metres, meaning that many island and coastal areas would be submerged, with devastating natural consequences for the environment, but also an incalculable humanitarian disaster.
The diagnosis
In the new study, BAS sent submarines robotically The Thwaites glacier is melting and will indeed take most of West Antarctica’s ice with it, according to the new study. Thwaites and the rest of the region’s ice will be gone within 170 years from today, and sea level rise will be around 65 centimeters, which is within the range of previous estimates.
“Everyone agrees that the retreat of Thwaites Glacier will accelerate sometime in the next century. However, there is concern that additional processes revealed by recent studies, processes that have not yet been studied well enough to be incorporated into large-scale models, could cause the retreat to accelerate more rapidly,” says Dr Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist at BAS.
Naftemporiki.gr
