A team of scientists are 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 would rise because of global warming eating away at Antarctica’s ice.
Thirty-two scientists yesterday were to start a more than two-month mission aboard a US research ship to investigate the crucial area where the massive, but melting, Thwaites glacier faces the Amundsen Sea and might eventually lose large amounts of ice because of warm water.
The Florida-sized glacier has been given the nickname the “doomsday glacier” because of how much ice it has and how much seas could rise if it all melts — more than 65cm over hundreds of years.
Photo: AP
Because of its importance, the UK and the US are conducting a US$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 on Wednesday aboard the RV Nathaniel B. Palmer, which was 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 45 billion tonnes of ice into the water a year.
The British Antarctic Survey says the glacier is responsible for 4 percent of global sea rise, and the conditions leading it to lose more ice are accelerating, University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos said from McMurdo station last month.
Oregon State University ice scientist Erin Pettit said that Thwaites appears to be collapsing in three ways: melting from below by ocean water; the land part of the glacier “is losing its grip” to the place it attaches to the seabed, so a large chunk can come off into the ocean and later melt; and the glacier’s ice shelf is breaking into hundreds of fractures like a damaged vehicle windshield.
The fractures are what Pettit said she fears would be the most troublesome with 10km long cracks forming in just a year.
No one has stepped foot on the key ice-water interface at Thwaites. In 2019, Wahlin was on a team that explored the area from a ship using a robotic ship, but never went ashore.
Wahlin’s team is to use two robot ships — her own large one called Ran which she used in 2019 and the more agile Boaty McBoatface, the crowdsource named drone that could go further under the area of Thwaites that protrudes over the ocean — to get under Thwaites.
The ship-bound scientists are to measure water temperature, the sea floor and ice thickness. They are to look at cracks in the ice, how the ice is structured and tag seals on islands off the glacier.
Thwaites “looks different from other ice shelves,” Wahlin said. “It almost looks like a jumble of icebergs that have been pressed together. So it’s increasingly clear that this is not a solid piece of ice like the other ice shelves are, nice smooth solid ice. This was much more jagged and scarred.”
FAKE NEWS? ‘When the government demands the press become a state mouthpiece under the threat of punishment, something has gone very wrong,’ a civic group said The top US broadcast regulator on Saturday threatened media outlets over negative coverage of the Middle East war, after US President Donald Trump slammed critical headlines from the “Fake News Media.” The US president since his first term has derided mainstream media as “fake news” and has sued major outlets over what he sees as unfair coverage. Brendan Carr, head of the US Federal Communications Commission — which oversees the nation’s radio, television and Internet media — said broadcasters risked losing their licenses over news coverage. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will
INFLUTENTIAL THEORIST: Habermas was particularly critical of the ‘limited interest’ shown by German politicians in ‘shaping a politically effective Europe Jurgen Habermas, whose work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a key intellectual figure in his native Germany, has died. He was 96. Habermas’ publisher, Suhrkamp, said he died on Saturday in Starnberg, near Munich. Habermas frequently weighed in on political matters over several decades. His extensive writing crossed the boundaries of academic and philosophical disciplines, providing a vision of modern society and social interaction. His best-known works included the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action. Habermas, who was 15 at the time of Nazi Germany’s defeat, later recalled the dawn of
The Chinese public maintains relatively warm sentiments toward Taiwan and strongly prefers non-military paths to improving cross-strait relations, a recent survey conducted by the Atlanta, Georgia-based Carter Center and Emory University showed. The “China Pulse” research project, which polled 2,506 adults between Oct. 27 last year and Jan. 1 this year, found that 86 percent of respondents support strengthening cultural ties, while 81 percent favor deepening economic interaction. The report, co-authored by political scientists at Emory University and advisors at the Carter Center, indicates that the Chinese public views Taiwan’s importance through a lens of shared history and culture rather than geopolitical
A ship that appears to be taking on the identity of a scrapped gas carrier exited the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, showing how strategies to get through the waterway are evolving as the Middle East war progresses. The vessel identifying as liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Jamal left the Strait on Friday morning, ship-tracking data show. However, the same tanker was also recorded as having beached at an Indian demolition yard in October last year, where it is being broken up, according to market participants and port agent’s reports. The ship claiming to be Jamal is likely a zombie vessel that
RSS