Thwaites Glacier faces sudden retreat

New images of the seafloor in Antarctica have unveiled the past retreat of the Thwaites Glacier, helping us plan for the future.

Sometimes nicknamed the Doomsday Glacier, the glacier in West Antarctica is roughly the size of Oregon and is currently in a phase of fast retreat.

Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey visited the glacier and used an underwater robot called Rán to gather never-before-possible images.

Visible in those images are 160 ridges, dug into the seafloor by the glacier as it rode the tides during its retreats.

The spacing between these ridges reveals periods of rapid and slower retreat. This includes a period over the last 200 years where, within a six-month period, the glacier retreated by 1.3 miles per year after detaching from the seabed.

This is double the rate of retreat recorded between 2011 and 2019.

Today, the researchers involved in this study say Thwaites is holding on to its fingernails and we should expect big changes over small timescales.

The potential impact of the glacier’s retreat could result in a global sea-level rise of up to 26 inches.

Thwaites Glacier is facing multiple threats, in addition to rising air temperatures in Antarctica, because the glacier is anchored to a seabed it is also subject to warm ocean currents causing melting from below.

The glacier is already responsible for 4% of annual global sea level rises, a collapse could be catastrophic for coastal regions around the world.