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Swirling underwater "storms" are aggressively melting the ice shelves of two vital Antarctic glaciers, with potentially "far-reaching implications" for global sea level rise, according to a recent study.
Antarctica is like a fist with a skinny thumb stuck out toward South America. Pine Island Glacier is near the base of this thumb. Thwaites — known as the Doomsday Glacier because of the devastating impact its demise would have on global sea level rise — sits next to it.
Over the past few decades, these icy giants have experienced rapid melting driven by warming ocean water, especially at the point where they rise from the seabed and come afloat as ice shelves.
The new study, published last month in Nature Geosciences, is the first to systematically analyze how the ocean is melting ice shelves over just hours and days, rather than seasons or years, its authors say.
They found that, together with other short-lived processes, the storms caused 20% of the melting at the two glaciers over a nine-month period. The researchers also highlighted a worrying feedback loop.
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📸: Jeremy Harbeck/NASA
