The melting of glaciers is a phenomenon that worries specialists. Now, eyes are on a huge mass of ice located in the Antarctic glacier, which could raise sea level up to 60 centimeters across the planet.
This is the Thwaites Glacier, the widest in the world. As it rises, warm sea water shoots farther beneath the ice than scientists thought: up to 6 kilometers.
“Water is able to penetrate under ice to much greater distances than we thought,” said Eric Rignot, a scientist at the University of California, Irvine and NASA’s Joint Propulsion Laboratory.
The investigation
The team from the University of California Irvine confirmed widespread contact between ocean water and the glacier, a process that is replicated throughout Antarctica and Greenland. This causes “vigorous melting” that may require a reassessment of global sea level rise projections.
The researchers relied on data collected from March to June 2023 by the Finnish commercial satellite mission ICEYE.
“These ICEYE data provided a series of long-term daily observations that closely match tidal cycles,” said senior author Rignot, a professor of Earth system science at UC Irvine. “In the past, we had some data available sporadically, and with just those few observations it was difficult to know what was happening,” he added.
How to stop its melting
Thwaites grew up during the Ice Age and dug a channel beneath itself as it moved along the continental shelf. To this day, it rests on bumps and ridges on the seafloor, to which the ice adheres, creating resistance and helping to contain the glacier.
Specialists are really worried, since the currents of warm water that surround the area could sneak into the channel below.
The person who began to worry about this was glaciologist Slawek Tulaczyk, from the University of California Santa Cruz. The solution he proposed was simple: drill into its subglacial lakes to pump water from them, gushing out of the pump outlets and freezing into small crystals before it splashed on the Antarctic surface, “like a snow gun.”
Under this plan, intended as “Antarctic ice preservation,” the Thwaites Glacier would freeze in place and a catastrophic rise in sea level would be avoided.
Another team of scientists, meanwhile, suggested that strips of insulating fabric could be placed over vulnerable glaciers to keep them cold.
Glaciologist John Moore, from the University of Lapland, proposed building a 100-meter-high wall on the seabed to stop the melting of the ice in Greenland. Additionally, he suggested creating 300-meter artificial islands to block the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers.
Fountain: LB24 / Diary 26.
