El Niño May Have Kicked Off Thwaites Glacier Retreat

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https://eos.org/articles/el-nino-may-have-kicked-off-thwaites-glacier-retreat

By Grace van Deelen, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier is currently losing significant mass, contributing to around 4% of all global sea level rise. Now, new research suggests that the start of Thwaites’s current retreat aligns with that of the nearby Pine Island Glacier, which is also losing mass rapidly. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, indicate that the mass loss was more likely spurred by regional conditions, such as an El Niño event, .... Scientists have observed accelerating ice loss from Thwaites since the 1970s, mostly via satellite data. ...Thwaites likely began to retreat around the 1940s, coinciding with the beginning of a retreat phase at neighboring Pine Island Glacier that had been determined by previous research. ...a prolonged El Niño that occurred from 1939 to 1942 could have spurred the retreat of both glaciers, according to the authors. El Niño events tend to bring warmer-than-average temperatures to the Southern Ocean and cause warm water to flow onto the continental shelf upon which the Thwaites Glacier sits, according to the authors. ...Why the glaciers did not quickly recover from the 1940s perturbations is an open question, according to Wellner. ...said Wellner... “Because we know these two glaciers are retreating in conjunction with each other, we are looking for external drivers. And the external drivers that happen around the right time are increased anthropogenic warming,” she said. But directly pinpointing the cause of the retreat is a “step farther” than what the new paper shows, she said.... 

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