The enormous glacier is in trouble:
The Thwaites Glacier, an ice formation the size of Florida, can change the world. And the latest research shows that some of its most vulnerable spots are in greater danger than previously thought.
Thwaites holds a colossal amount of ice, enough to gradually raise sea levels by over two feet(Opens in a new tab), though its collapse in a heating climate could unleash many more feet from neighboring glaciers. The Antarctic glacier has destabilized, retreating back nearly nine miles since the 1990s. If much of it progressively melts in the coming decades and centuries, large swathes of coastal cities and populated areas around the globe could become submerged, and easily thrashed by storms. For this reason, scientists are now intensely researching where Thwaites is melting, and how fast it might melt. These are monumental questions for Earth's future denizens.
[...] "Thwaites is the one spot in Antarctica that has the potential to dump an enormous amount of water into the ocean over the next decades," Sridhar Anandakrishnan, a professor of glaciology at Penn State University, told Mashable in 2021.
That's why, for better or worse, Thwaites has earned the moniker "Doomsday Glacier." But, crucially, civilization is not inherently doomed, climate scientists emphasize. We are not hapless; we have energy choices that can limit the worst consequences of climate change.
The latest 2023 research, straight from the West Antarctic source, further shows how the glacier is melting. The critical point is beneath Thwaites' ice shelf, which is the end of the glacier that reaches over the ocean. Crucially, ice shelves ground themselves to the ocean floor, acting somewhat like "a cork in a bottle" to hold back the rest of colossal glaciers from flowing unimpeded into the sea. So if the ice shelf eventually goes, so can the glacier (though this process progresses from over many decades to centuries).
Glaciologists drilled through nearly 2,000 feet of Thwaites' ice shelf to lower down a yellow, miniature submarine-like robot called Icefin, into the dark water, allowing them to view what's happening at this vulnerable grounding region. The recent research(Opens in a new tab), just published in the science journal Nature(Opens in a new tab), shows two main findings:
The glacier continues to melt underwater, but along the flat expanses that make up a majority of this ice shelf, this thinning is occurring more slowly (some six to 16 feet, or two to five meters, per year) than researchers expected.
Yet, Thwaites is melting faster than expected in cracks beneath the critical floating ice shelf. Scientists suspect relatively warmer water is seeping into the natural cracks and crevasses, which amplifies melting at these weaker points (shown in the footage below).
[...] "Our results are a surprise but the glacier is still in trouble," Peter Davis, an oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey who took some of the recent measurements at Thwaites, said in a statement(Opens in a new tab). "If an ice shelf and a glacier are in balance, the ice coming off the continent will match the amount of ice being lost through melting and iceberg calving. What we have found is that despite small amounts of melting there is still rapid glacier retreat, so it seems that it doesn't take a lot to push the glacier out of balance."
(Score: 2, Funny) by Barenflimski on Monday February 27, @10:01PM (1 child)
It's coming. These guys will be able to say, "I told you so." Get stilts for you and your family now!
Until then, you can now say to your friends, confidently, "The end is near."
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @12:24AM
Naa, pontoons. Mobility baby!
[trundles off to invest in pontoon factory...]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sfm on Monday February 27, @10:29PM (1 child)
From the same Nature Article:
If Thwaites Glacier continues to accelerate, retreat, and widen at rates consistent with
recent changes, it could contribute several cm to sea-level rise by the end of the century.
So yes, it could increase sea levels by 2+ feet, but that is a total over a few centuries.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Wednesday March 01, @09:49PM
I'm having trouble calculating those 2 feet, on Wikipedia it even says 3 feet. Florida is 170,312 square kilometers, the oceans are 361 million km2. That's about 2120 times as much as Florida. So for a rise of 2 feet, the glacier would have to be 4240 feet thick (entirely). In the article they've drilled down 2000 feet. So in my estimation the total sea level rise can never be more than 1 foot, probably less because it's not a perfect bar shape. I know this way of calculating is not entirely correct, but it's good enough for an estimate.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday February 27, @10:39PM (5 children)
First, it's fake news. There is no climate change. It's all just politically motivated. It's a libural conspiracy diobolical plot I tell you!
Then, it might be real, but it's not conclusive.
Then, climate change is real, but it isn't going to affect us in any meaningful way.
Then, climate change is real and may affect us, but it's not man made. We certainly can't take the blame for it. Rather, we never want to actually own up to the end results of our own policies.
Then, climate change is man made, but we can't possibly do anything about it. No possible action we take would possibly help.
Then, well, we could do something about climate change, but that would require (OMG!) regulations!
Then, we could regulate this, but it would simply cost too much. So let's just let it happen. After all, it isn't going to affect old wealthy white heterosexual christian males during their lifetimes. So it is irrelevant whatever the long term consequences may be.
Then, it doesn't matter how many species go extinct. Let them eat bugs.
Then, OMG, this might cause 2 cm of Walt Disney World to be underwater! OMG! This could be a planetary disastrophe!
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday February 28, @12:07AM (4 children)
That's where I've been for the past thirty years. Still seeing no reason to expect that list to change over my lifetime despite the ongoing hustle. Sure, in a couple of centuries, climate change might become the bogey man you wish it were, but by then we should have knocked out these bigger problems and have ample resources, knowledge, and technology/infrastructure to fix climate change with.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @05:22AM (3 children)
I love the hand waving, bravo. Perhaps Captain Spock will teleport down and give is the gift of wisdom and all our problems will be cured with his hand-held tricorder. Some real problem solving, not the bullshit with measurements and studies.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 28, @06:30AM
Compared to what?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @08:58AM (1 child)
You're an idiot. Any real solution a serious problem is going to involve measurement and studies. By arguing that we don't need to measure it you are actually agreeing with khallow that it is a made up problem.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday February 28, @02:20PM
The problem is that we have measured it and it's presently roughly 1.5 C per doubling of CO2. The long term warming hasn't been observed yet and might not happen at all! Similarly, we've measured the effects of a little more than 1 C of warming since 1850 and almost every problem that cites climate change as a cause also cites a real cause as a cause (like blaming [soylentnews.org] coral reef bleaching on warming and acidification, but then finding out that the source documents cite local conditions like fertilizer runoff or overfishing as principle causes).
We have done the measurements. There is human-caused global warming. But there is also a huge amount of hysteria and chicanery surrounding this topic.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by khallow on Monday February 27, @11:50PM (19 children)
No, Thwaites "earned" that moniker because Rolling Stone Magazine [rollingstone.com] was fishing for eyeballs back in May 2017. This google search [google.com] shows how it morphed from a throw-away title in 2017 to the earned moniker of today without involving any sort of scientific valid process.
It strikes me as extremely dishonest to peddle this sort of language for sea level rise that would be decades to centuries in the making (assuming it is as fast as advertised) and not that much when it all happens.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Tork on Tuesday February 28, @12:02AM (15 children)
Mmm hmm.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @12:29AM (5 children)
Okay, how about "💩💩💩 Glacier"?
(Score: 4, Touché) by Tork on Tuesday February 28, @12:32AM (4 children)
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @03:36AM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday February 28, @03:52AM (2 children)
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 28, @06:00AM
Yes. They start with those recognizable snowflakes and quickly lose them as the pressure increases as you get deeper down in the glacier. At some point, it's nearly pure ice possibly with bits of trapped undissolved air. Enough thickness and a slope, then the ice will flow downhill. And when you get near the bottom of the glacier, you can have all kinds of weird stuff such as the water of the story underneath or chunks of dirt and boulders dragging along the ground/bedrock, if the ice is on the move.
The latter is one of the more aggressive forms of erosion and it is thought to have created global "uncomformities" or gaps in the geological record during the times (more accurately, some span of time prior to the glaciation) when Earth was thought to have become fully icebound (some periods prior to 600 million years ago during the Great Oxygenation when CO2 was being replaced with slowly increasing amounts of oxygen).
(Score: 4, Informative) by RS3 on Tuesday February 28, @06:01AM
Maybe more interestingly there's a "National Snow and Ice Data Center" NSIDC, pretty cool; any of these give the story of falling snow eventually compacting into ice:
https://nsidc.org/learn/parts-cryosphere/glaciers/science-glaciers#:~:text=A%20glacier%20forms%20when%20snow,melting,%20evaporation,%20or%20calving. [nsidc.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacier [wikipedia.org]
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/glacier/ [nationalgeographic.org]
https://www.britannica.com/science/glacier [britannica.com]
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Tuesday February 28, @02:46AM (8 children)
"On climate". It still annoys me that these guys are acting like climate change is the only problem in the world.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Tork on Tuesday February 28, @02:56AM (7 children)
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday February 28, @03:01AM (6 children)
I would expect anyone who advocates for society-level policies to be aware of the trade offs those policies. A big one here is that climate change mitigation isn't cheap and causes sacrifices in other areas of society. My take, of course, is that the poverty that such mitigation strategies would create would set back the goal more than if they did nothing at all. It's like the Population Bomb people in that they're worse for their own cause than their opponents are!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Tork on Tuesday February 28, @03:27AM (5 children)
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 28, @04:30AM (4 children)
Funny how that works. If you don't talk explicitly about solutions, you can't get criticized for those solutions, right? Needless to say, I don't play that game.
Because? We have decades of history here. Those mitigation efforts we've done were mostly a hot mess. And no matter what solution you fail to discuss, it won't slow melting of Thwaites glacier, unless it's an enormous, radical global mitigation. That's global poverty right there. And global poverty means higher population growth.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Tork on Tuesday February 28, @04:47AM (3 children)
So... you invent things for them to say and then argue that. k. Why don't you switch over to NotePad and argue with me in there, you can fill in my side of it like you are with the individuals I quoted.
Mainly because I'm not interested in your creative writing efforts.
Yes, I'm aware that you and a lot of other noisy people are seeking the solution that involves not lifting a finger. That's why I'm taking you to task for pretending like you had some noble goal in mind.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 28, @05:15AM (2 children)
I didn't invent anything - read what I actually wrote. I merely quoted "if we take proper action on climate" and examined what that means. Despite your accusation, they didn't mention anything else that needs "proper action" - that's a significant bit of informaton that implies again that they were discussing climate change in a vacuum without regard for the other problems of humanity. Second, we don't need them to discuss particular solutions, because we already have seen those particular solutions in actions somewhere in the world.
To Godwin this thread a bit, if some nazis start muttering about "if we take proper action on the Jews", would that sound innocuous to you? Maybe they're talking about some outreach program where nazis and Jews can get together and understand each other as friends, right? We haven't discussed any solutions, so it could be something nice. But there's that ugly history that keeps getting in the way of that interpretation.
Climate change mitigation isn't quite as bad, but it's wrecked Europe's energy security (such as ending a considerable portion of coal power without an adequate replacement) and raised global food prices (via 2000s era US ethanol subsidies). Both of those have probably killed people (though not at the 11 million Holocaust victims level or the 100 million World War Two victims level) and they've been totally ineffective at lowering atmospheric CO2 levels. So when I hear someone talking about proper action, when the history books are filled with improper actions that fall far short of the necessary ambitious level, one has to wonder what radical solutions they're considering that somehow won't create a ton of high fertility poor people. My take is that there won't be any such, until we naturally get to the point where fossil fuels don't make sense.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday February 28, @05:40AM (1 child)
Uh huh.
And you wonder why I'm not big on wasting time sending you links. What they were discussing was the name of the glacier. That was the whole point of that article, and it was specifically a point YOU brought up. You would have known that had you clicked the link... and quite possibly if you were simply paying attention while reading the quotes I pasted. I could provide an argument to the rest of your contrarian point and eventually you'd probably get to "well we need a lower population" again ... as if that'd gel with your current fashion ensemble without a lot of word-smithing.
"I don't think we should approach climate change this way..." is a perfectly fine thing to say. "Those guys you quoted are quietly thinking about forcing poor countries to replace their farm animals with crickets..." is just weird and smacks of jonesing for a debate no-one else has shown an interest in having.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 28, @06:29AM
They made a short political statement that happened to start with criticism of this media nickname for the glacier and went beyond the name. The part I noted was the middle third of your quote too. It's not an aside, but an integral part of the quote. Both the sinister nickname and the later tunnel vision which only can focus on climate change is typical of climate discourse today. They are two parts of a larger myopia.
One can't understand the problems with climate policy and advocacy for climate change mitigation until one sees the various mental aberrations at play.
As to your reluctance to "send links", we need to keep in mind that links by themselves usually do not support or oppose a given argument or viewpoint, and they can have plenty of problems with them. It is our role to consider how such links can support what we're trying to say and attempt to anticipate problems that can come up.
And of course, I consider refusal to support an argument as acknowledgement that one doesn't have such support. I don't take such guff from anyone else - and there's plenty of people who play that game. Why should you get a pass?
I get this stuff is work and well, you probably didn't come here for that. But it's a useful life skill to be able to justify your ideas coherently and convincingly in conversation and to be able to defend yourself from rhetorical sleight of hand.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @05:33AM (2 children)
It strikes me that one side in the debate is almost completely dishonest and argues almost exclusively in bad-faith, while the other must be holier that the Virgin Mary lest any one of the highly paid hotheads goes off on a bad-faith dishonest diatribe. I'll include "intellectual" Jordon Peterson who, rather than taking on the actual issue, reaches for claims he knows have been debunked [theguardian.com]. That's not a guy interested in figuring out the truth.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 28, @06:39AM (1 child)
But which side is which?
So because Peterson went on a tear through no fault of my own, I'm getting that bad-faith, dishonest diatribe from you? It's even worse than you declared!
The use of "doomsday glacier" is blatantly dishonest though not of significant harm in itself. It's not a case of a journalist falling slightly shy of the holiness of the Virgin Mary.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @09:14AM
From that link
Note that he doesn't actually refute it. I can measure the distance across this room (Droom) to within a fraction of a percent. I can also measure the distance to the next town (Dtown) to a fraction of a percent. The error in Dtown will still be orders of magnitude greater than the entirety of Droom.