There’s nowhere else on Earth quite like Antarctica. Our planet’s southernmost continent
is a land of extremes, and a place of incredible natural beauty. But there’s also a cutting sense
of dread that increasingly runs alongside all the visuals of these spectacular, icy landscapes.
And, so often when we contemplate the future of Earth, we end up considering Antarctica
as a see-all gauge for what’s going wrong. So, this is Unveiled, and today we’re answering
the extraordinary question; why are scientists growing worried about the Doomsday Glacier?
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It can feel as though doomsday predictions are difficult to escape nowadays. Scroll
through the news or switch on a movie, and it’s all there. Wherever you look,
it seems that the end of the world is nigh, in one way or another. But every so often,
a story or case study comes along with a little more meat to its bones than just your regular
panic piece about how life on Earth is limping to a close. In early 2022, for example, there’s
one prospect - one mass - that’s on the minds of many a concerned scientist. The Doomsday Glacier.
The Doomsday Glacier does also go by a slightly less ominous name - Thwaites Glacier. But, really,
that’s as far as we can go in terms of turning down the bad news when it comes to this particular
hunk of ice. Located in West Antarctica, in what’s variously described as one of the most
remote places on Earth, Thwaites Glacier is a giant of its kind. But it’s getting smaller, and
that’s the problem. Currently coming in at roughly the size of Florida, it consists of the ice sheet
(on land) and the ice shelf (floating off land), as most glaciers do. It loses about fifty billion
tons of ice every year, though, shedding it into the surrounding water, which in turn accounts
for around four percent of the total global sea rise - according to the British Antarctic
Survey. In terms of individual contribution, few glaciers offer anywhere near as much as Thwaites
does to the current rising sea levels. Perhaps that’s already reason enough for
scientists to be homing in on Thwaites, and trying their best to understand it. But really, it’s
feared that there could still be bigger problems ahead. It’s been estimated that if the entire
Thwaites shelf were to melt, then sea levels could rise by at least two feet all around the world.
This would bring long-lasting devastation to so many coastal towns, major cities,
and communities. But, more than even that, because Thwaites is such a large glacier at present, it
also exerts a major physical influence along the remaining West Antarctic coast. And so, scientists
are also worried that if it were to breakaway, disintegrate, or disappear, then it could have
knock-on effects for the rest of the surrounding ice… triggering a fast-moving chain reaction
wherein yet more of Antarctica melts to water, and therefore the sea levels rise even more severely.
Fuelled by these mounting concerns, a team of 32 scientists set out for Thwaites in January 2022,
in search of answers. Their two-month mission is part of the International Thwaites Glacier
Collaboration, which is a five-year, $50 million joint initiative between the USA
and the UK, aiming to better understand the ice. As well as the 32 on board an icebreaker ship,
the Nathaniel B. Palmer, there are countless others in offices all over the world,
ready to process streams of incoming data. Much of that data will be provided by two state-of-the-art
robot probes, though, including one from Sweden’s University of Gothenburg… and another from the UK,
famously named Boaty McBoatface following a brief (and pretty hilarious) internet
naming poll back in 2016. Now, though, Boaty’s mission is clearly a much more serious matter.
The robot probes will most significantly be deployed beneath the Thwaites ice shelf,
as the team study the underside of the glacier first and foremost. Here is where some of the
most concerning action is taking place, as steady sea temperature increases have meant that Thwaites
is not just shedding from its sides but is also melting from below. It’s known that the
underside of Thwaites is by no means as smooth and complete as the glacier’s topside can seem.
Walk across the top surface of it, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was just one
massive but well-rounded and predictable mass of ice… but no. Instead, on the bottom,
Thwaites is marked and scarred with long-running cracks and ever-deepening crevices. Given the
warming (and subsequent melting) that’s happening from below, then, scientists fear these cracks,
crevices and widening cavities mean that the entire glacier is growing weak.
Regardless of how strong and permanent it might look when viewed from above, the future of
Thwaites is uncertain. There are some parts of it that are of particular concern, especially along
meeting points between the glacier and land, or the glacier and the seabed. Ordinarily,
these locations should be strong and reliable… but right now they appear to be brittle. And so,
it could be that they soon fail, which could then cut huge sections of the glacier adrift…
to split a once unbreakable mass into a far more vulnerable collection of crumbling islands.
In this way, it might be argued that an in-depth study of Thwaites can double-up to
serve predictions for the entirety of the Antarctic continent. Because, after all,
Thwaites is by no means the only glacier that contemporary scientists are worried about.
Another of great concern is the nearby Pine Island Glacier, which can be found (close to Thwaites) in
Antarctica’s Pine Island Bay, in the Amundsen Sea. The Pine Island Glacier is the fastest
melting glacier on the continent. It’s lost many miles’ worth of itself since around the 1940s,
but what’s even more sobering is that the breakup of this bulk of ice has actually
been accelerating over recent years and decades in the twenty-first century. The situation for
Pine Island, then, is getting worse and worse, at a quickening rate. Were it to fully collapse,
it’s been estimated that there’d be at least another one-and-a-half feet of global sea rise
to contend with. If Pine Island and Thwaites go, then, as some projections suggest,
we’re looking at sea levels increasing by upwards of three-and-half feet. And,
again, that’s quite possibly just the best-case scenario, as scientists continue to debate the
wider impact that a major glacier breakaway could have on the rest of Antarctica’s surrounding ice.
If a major chain reaction is also triggered, then the results become less predictable…
but sea waters will rise further still. In the modern age of science and technology,
the exploration of Earth perhaps doesn’t always generate the buzz or attention that it once did.
Thanks to past work by various, now-iconic explorers, there are so few places on this
planet left to discover for the first time. It may be natural, then, that we should have set our
sights further afield in search of new frontiers, which is why our efforts toward space travel tend
to dominate headlines today. But missions like this latest one, to the southernmost depths of our
world, serve as a stark reminder that we’ve still a lot of work to do before we can truly understand
just the place we’re living in right now. The concern and mystery surrounding Thwaites
Glacier, in particular, has led a determined team to journey into the ice, in a bid to better our
knowledge. Modern technology means that we can now send robots to the heart of the problem,
to the dark underside of that ice, to investigate how and why it’s disintegrating. And to generate a
better-informed prediction as to how long we’ve got left until its gone.
In early 2022, at the time of the mission’s start, it’s said that we could have just three to five
years before the Thwaites ice shelf, at least, is no more. Before its cast off into the ocean,
and the knock-on effects are witnessed along coastlines and flatlands all over the world map.
The unfortunate truth is that this mission to study it can do nothing to slow or stop the
changes in Antarctica from happening. That task is a global one. But, in the meantime, science can at
least paint a better and more accurate picture for the watching world to make sense of. Because, if
we hadn’t heard of Thwaites Glacier before, we may well hear much more about it in the coming years -
and for no good reason. And that’s why scientists are growing worried about the Doomsday Glacier.
What do you think? Is there anything we missed? Let us know in the comments, check out these other
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