The world’s widest glacier is melting “more aggressively” than earlier projections said. Its effect on global sea level rise could be twice the current estimates, according to new research by a team of glaciologists.
The glacier makes it difficult for scientists to predict future sea level rise. A typical ice sheet models have treated the grounding line as fixed and mostly stable. He is a project scientist at UCLA who was an Earth system science researcher at UC Irvine at the time of the study. The study found that melting is making the ice slowly detach from one of these ridges, called the Mouginot Ridge.
Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is known as the “Doomsday Glacier” because its collapse could cause serious damage, as per CNN. Glaciologists from the University of California , Irvine, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed a new ice sheet model to better understand what is happening beneath the glacier, according to CNN. But “we have come to acknowledge a different arrangement beneath Earth’s major ocean-terminating glaciers,” said the report’s lead author Mattia Poinelli.
The findings were published Monday in the journal Nature Communications.
After updating the model to include a “grounding zone,” the scientists found that Thwaites Glacier could add up to 1.2 inches to global sea levels by 2100.
This is twice the amount predicted by earlier estimates, and it could happen even without further global warming.
Scientists estimate there is a 60% chance that the ice will break free from the ridge by the end of the century.
