Can glacier be studied before it vanishes?

Melting risks triggering major sea-level rise by century’s end

U.S. and British science agencies announced a multi-million dollar research mission this week to study an enormous and remote Antarctic glacier that is already showing accelerating ice loss. If it continues, it could trigger a major rise in sea levels before the end of the century.

The glacier, named Thwaites, acts as a kind of linchpin to the West Antarctic ice sheet. It is larger than Pennsylvania and presents a 120-kilometre-long front to the ocean, in this case the Amundsen Sea, where recent studies have suggested warm waters at extreme depths are causing a major glacial retreat that NASA described as “unstoppable.”

“The evidence is amassing that we really need to understand this better, so that we know where we’ll be in people’s lifetimes,” said Paul Cutler, Antarctic Integrated System Science program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Polar Programs.

The closest permanent research station is 1,600 kilometres away, and the approach to the glacier by sea is often blocked by floating ice. The mission is expected to take several years. The NSF suggested the cost of the research will be $20 million to $25 million, but that “logistics support for field work would increase that commitment significantly.”

“I can envisage ships, I can envisage camps on the glacier itself, there’s going to be aircraft flying missions over, and possibly helicopters,” Cutler said. “From the ships, there will probably be autonomous underwater vehicles, underneath the ice shelf. It’s up to the imagination of the scientists to make the best case, and we’ll work, to the extent we can, to make that happen.”

Warming waters are weakening the glacier, causing portions to break off. Between 1992 and 2011, the Thwaites grounding line retreated inland 13 kilometres, a 2014 study found.

According to NSF, Thwaites is already contributing an astonishing 10 per cent of all global sea level rise. The fear is just how much this could increase.

Thwaites itself could ultimately contribute around 60 centimetres to the global sea level if it were to be lost entirely. But it also connects with the interior of the West Antarctic ice sheet. The entirety of West Antarctica could contribute more than three metres of sea level rise if it were to melt entirely into the ocean.