The time of the “Doomsday Glacier” is ending, making it worse for the rest of the world.
The “Doomsday Glacier,” also known as the Thwaites Glacier, refers to an ice sheet that lies in East Antarctica that has been weakening for the past 30 years. It has gone unnoticed by many scientists. On the other side, West Antarctica is already deteriorating at an alarming rate, making the end of the “Doomsday Glacier” an even bigger problem. This ice sheet holds 10 times more ice and is roughly the size of Florida, making it one of the largest glaciers in the world. Scientists believe that its collapse can lead to a rise of around 26 inches in sea level, and the weakening of West Antarctica will not make it better.
A reason for concern is due to the former East Antarctica Conger ice shelf that was around 20 times the size of Manhattan. Catherine Walker, a glaciologist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, thought that this ice shelf was not going to go anywhere. “It wasn’t even melting that rapidly,” she said. However, while perusing satellite images, she saw that the Conger ice shelf was missing when it was in that same location six days prior. In an effort to understand how this happened, polar meteorologist Jonathan Wille of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH, in Zurich, Switzerland, along with Walker and 50 other scientists, started looking for clues about what caused the disappearance of the Conger ice shelf. They came across an important clue: a powerful storm passed along the coast during that time, causing the sea surface to bounce back and forth. This led to the ice shelf breaking along existing cracks, and the powerful winds of the storm eventually broke the shelf into different fragments.
“We have every reason to think that [these storms] will become more intense in the future,” says Wille. This raises concerns about the Thwaites Glacier and its deterioration.
In terms of the Conger ice shelf, the story is a little more complicated. The ice shelf was already in bad condition when the storm hit. The Conger ice shelf had long been stabilized because it pressed against an island 50 kilometers off the coast. However, as the ice shelf thinned, it became too weak to withstand those forces, leading to its escape from the rest of the island. Conger’s collapse will not noticeably impact sea level because the glaciers it had stabilized are small, but it is worrisome that this happened in a supposedly stable area of Antarctica.
“This sector of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet has been very stable,” says Mathieu Morlighem, a glaciologist at Dartmouth College. Some computer simulations predicted that East Antarctica might even gain some mass over the next century. However, if surrounding glaciers tend to destabilize, “then that completely changes the picture.”
