Doomsday may be delayed at Antarctica’s most vulnerable glacier
By Paul Voosen, Science.
Excerpt: Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier isn’t called the Doomsday Glacier for nothing. Were the Florida-size ice sheet to melt away, it could raise global sea levels by 65 centimeters. And because it is a keystone that holds back other ice sheets from flowing into the ocean, its disappearance could unlock a total of more than 3 meters of global sea level rise. In 2018, U.S. and U.K. funders created the 100-person International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) to probe the ice—and its future.... ...one conclusion is that some of the worst-case scenarios—such as the runaway collapse of the iceberg-calving front of the glacier, which juts into the ocean as an ice shelf—are unlikely this century, says Robert Larter, a BAS marine geophysicist and co-lead of the project. That worry, he says, “is not the huge monster it might have been 10 years ago.” ...preliminary results from one of ITGC’s modeling groups suggest that in coming decades Thwaites will steadily retreat but not collapse, contributing up to 6 centimeters of global sea level rise by century’s end. ...Longer term, the outlook is still grim. Under a worst-case scenario for emissions, Thwaites and many of the ice sheets it buttresses could collapse by 2300, adding more than 4 meters to sea level, according to an estimate published this month in Earth’s Future by a large collaboration of modelers, including ITGC members....