The heart of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is not doing well. “The arteries are torn,” concludes researcher Dylan Rood. After all, he experienced that two monster glaciers are melting at a rapid pace: in a time span of more than 5,000 years, it has never happened as fast as now.
“Vital arteries in the heart of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet have ruptured,” Dylan Rood (Imperial College London) wrote, based on his research published in the journal Nature Geoscience. According to the researcher, it is now important to quickly find out whether it is too late to “stop the bleeding”. If this does not happen, the (melted) ice caps could be responsible for a sea level rise of no less than 3.4 meters.
‘Doomsday Glacier’
It concerns two glaciers: the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers. The first covers an area of no less than 192,000 square kilometers – that is almost the size of Great Britain – and has been a concern for some time. Since 2000, it has already lost a trillion tons of ice, making it responsible for about 4 percent of global sea level rise. No other Antarctic ice mass is so susceptible to change — earning it the nickname ‘doomsday glacier’. The second glacier, Pine Island Glacier, is slightly smaller with an area of 162,300 square kilometers.
To find out how sensitive these two monster glaciers are to global warming, researchers from the University of Maine and British Antarctic Survey (which includes scientists from Imperial College London) took a dive into the past.
Antarctic Beaches
After all, about 5,000 years ago the climate was warmer, the sea level was higher and glaciers were smaller. So the researchers went in search of ancient Antarctic beaches with shells and remains of penguins. In this way, they were able to determine the exact age of the ancient beaches and reconstruct the sea level height over the past 5,000 years.
What turned out? Over the past thirty years, the rate at which glaciers are melting has doubled. “While these fragile glaciers have been relatively stable over the past millennia, the rate at which they are melting has accelerated in recent decades, resulting in a rise in global sea levels,” concludes Rood.
The question is whether the bleeding can still be stopped. And unfortunately the researchers cannot answer that – without additional research.
Also read:
Glacier that can raise the sea three meters, threatens to lose its brake in five years (+)
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