one melting glacier could mean an eleven foot rise in sea level

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THIS AR­TI­CLES ON THE THWAITES GLACIER in West Antarc­tica is based on the ar­ticle “If Thwaites Glacier col­lapses, it would change global coast­lines for­ever” by Car­olyn Beeler for The World web­site. The sub-headline for this piece reads, “Sci­en­tists fear the col­lapse of Thwaites Glacier could one day desta­bi­lize sur­rounding glac­iers and even­tu­ally trigger up to 11 feet of global sea-level rise.” The ar­ticle continues:

“Days after the Nathaniel B. Palmer be­came the first ship to sail across the 75-mile face of West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier, a piece of its floating ice shelf bigger than Man­hattan crum­bled off the glacier into a flotilla of ice­bergs. Sci­en­tists aboard no­ticed some­thing had changed when the re­search vessel tried to nav­i­gate to a spot in front of the Florida-sized glacier and was blocked by ice-choked seas.

‘What we didn’t re­alize at the time is the ice [front] was coming out to chase us out,’ said Rob Larter, a ma­rine geo­physi­cist at the British Antarctic Survey and chief sci­en­tist on the ship. ‘The en­tire em­bay­ment where we’d been working for sev­eral days was lit­tered with icebergs.’

Satel­lite im­ages soon showed where these ice­bergs were coming from. A roughly 20-mile stretch of Thwaites had frac­tured into mile-long ice­bergs that were now being blown out into the bay in front of Thwaites.

‘It was quite re­mark­able,’ Larter said of the satel­lite im­ages. ‘Sud­denly, it was making sense with what we were seeing out of the windows.’

Thwaites Glacier is melting fast, and sci­en­tists fear its col­lapse could one day desta­bi­lize sur­rounding glac­iers and even­tu­ally trigger up to 11 feet of global sea-level rise.”

To read the orig­inal ar­ticle above in its en­tirety, click HERE.

The col­lapse of the Thwaites Glacier could desta­bi­lize sur­rounding glac­iers and trigger an 11-foot rise in sea level. Click To Tweet

ThwaitesGlacier 1000

FEA­TURED IMAGE: The photo at the top of this page is of the Thwaites Glacier (aka “Doomsday Glacier”). The front face rises as much as 75 feet above water in the areas where it is most in­tact. Roughly 90% of an ice sheet typ­i­cally sits below the wa­ter­line. (Photo: Car­olyn Beeler/The World)

 

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