An Antarctic body of ice nicknamed the 'Doomsday Glacier' could melt far faster than previously expected and is holding on 'by its fingernails,' according to new scientific research.
between warming seas and the much larger West Antarctic ice sheet, that gives it its ominous nickname., led by the University of South Florida , found that the Thwaites glacier has melted far faster in past centuries than has been observed in recent years – meaning that a similar brisk pace of retreat could be triggered in the future.
The researchers learned this by using underwater drones to map the sea floor under the glacier for the first time. Map of Thwaites Glacier shown in Landsat 8 satellite imagery collected in February 2019. The track of the mission of the autonomous underwater vehicle is shown in orange. Changes in grounding line positions of Thwaites Glacier in the recent past are shown by colored lines.
The ridges they mapped are"like a footprint" showing where the base of the glacier has previously sat,It shows that at some point in the last 200 years it had contracted twice as fast as has been observed in recent years, the release said. "Thwaites is really holding on today by its fingernails, and we should expect to see big changes over small timescales in the future – even from one year to the next – once the glacier retreats beyond a shallow ridge in its bed,"Alastair Graham, the USF marine geophysicist who led the study,frameborder="0″ allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen>In 2020, a study of those images found that...
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