Loss of glacier would imperil coastlines worldwide

[SamuelTheThird]

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2526630-the-race-to-understand-how-and-when-thwaites-glacier-will-collapse/

This is the natural fate of all glacier ice. The problem comes when more ice is lost to the ocean than is replenished from snowfall, which is now happening at Thwaites on an epic scale.

Since 2000, the glacier has lost more than a trillion tonnes of ice, and this rate of loss has doubled in the past 30 years. The big worry is that, if it collapsed entirely, it could ultimately trigger a wider collapse of the ice of the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, causing a calamitous sea-level rise of more than 3 metres, on average, changing the coastline of the entire planet.

-----

“We see it slowly collapsing before our eyes,” says Mathieu Morlighem at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. The front of the glacier, where the ice flowing from the continent meets the sea, is rapidly retreating inland.

Thwaites glacier is the “wild card” in the climate models, say Ted Scambos at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “It has the potential to dramatically change what sea-level rise will look like.”