Antarctic glacier shows fastest retreat in modern history

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By Hannah Richter, Science. 

Excerpt: In 2022, something shocking happened to the Hektoria Glacier, a small river of ice that slips into the sea near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Over 16 months, it retreated by 25 kilometers, and it lost a whopping 8 kilometers in just two of those months—the fastest glacial retreat in the modern record. Now, after a forensic analysis of the event reported today in Nature Geoscience, researchers say they have identified the worrisome mechanisms behind it: a combination of glacial earthquakes and a swath of thinned ice popping afloat and breaking apart in a geological instant. If the same processes were to occur at larger Antarctic glaciers, they could rapidly accelerate the retreat of ice sheets and raise global sea levels, says Jeremy Bassis, a glaciologist at the University of Michigan. The study is “telling us that those worst-case scenarios are maybe not as implausible as some people might have thought.” ...[Jeremy] Bassis wonders whether the same kind of catastrophic calving could occur at the much larger Thwaites Glacier, which is sometimes called the Doomsday Glacier because its retreat could unleash more than 3 meters of global sea level rise.... 

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