San Francisco Chronicle

‘Doomsday’ glacier threatened

- By Seth Borenstein Seth Borenstein is an Associated Press writer.

A team of scientists is sailing to “the place in the world that’s the hardest to get to” so they can better figure out how much and how fast seas will rise because of global warming eating away at Antarctica’s ice.

Thirty-two scientists on Thursday are starting a more than two-month mission aboard an American research ship to investigat­e the crucial area where the massive but melting Thwaites glacier faces the Amundsen Sea and may eventually lose large amounts of ice because of warm water. The Florida-sized glacier has gotten the nickname the “doomsday glacier” because of how much ice it has and how much seas could rise if it all melts — more than two feet over hundreds of years.

Because of its importance, the United States and the United Kingdom are in the midst of a joint $50 million mission to study Thwaites, the widest glacier in the world, by land and sea. Not near any of the continent’s research stations, Thwaites is on Antarctica’s western half, east of the jutting Antarctic Peninsula, which used to be the area scientists worried most about.

“Thwaites is the main reason I would say that we have so large an uncertaint­y in the projection­s of future sea level rise and that is because it’s a very remote area, difficult to reach,” Anna Wahlin, an oceanograp­her from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, said Wednesday in an interview from the Research Vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer, which was scheduled to leave its port in Chile hours later. “It is configured in a way so that it’s potentiall­y unstable. And that is why we are worried about this.”

Thwaites is putting about 50 billion tons of ice into the water a year. The British Antarctic Survey says the glacier is responsibl­e for 4% of global sea rise, and the conditions leading to it to lose more ice are accelerati­ng, University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos said from the McMurdo land station last month.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United States