Thwaites, Antarctica’s ‘doomsday’ glacier, is breaking up – and scientists are racing to get a closer look
- A team of researchers is sailing to Antarctica on a US$50 million mission, which will see the vessel Boaty McBoatface probing under the melting ice mass
- The Thwaites glacier – the world’s widest – is being eaten away by global warming, sending sea levels rising
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 been nicknamed the “doomsday glacier” because of how much ice it has and how much seas could rise if it all melts – more than two feet (65cm) over hundreds of years.
Because of its importance, the United States and the United Kingdom are in the midst of a joint 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 in an interview from the Research Vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer, which was expected to leave its port in Chile hours later.