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Two huge glaciers are falling, at an alarming rate, from the Antarctic ice sheet, raising the global level of seas and oceans, writes the Washington Post.
The huge Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers already contribute about 5% to global sea level rise. The complete melting of the Thwaites Glacier would raise sea and ocean levels by about 3 meters.
The new findings come from the analysis of images captured from the satellite. They show that glaciers have a natural system that prevents them from collapsing, but if destroyed, it could dump billions of tons of ice into the ocean.
“We already knew that these are the most important glaciers on the planet, and the new images show that they are in very bad shape,” said Stef Lhermitte, an expert at the Technical University of Delft, the Netherlands.
The Thwaites Glacier has an area almost as large as that of Great Britain. In the 1990s, it lost just over 10 billion tons of ice a year. Today, the loss is more than 80 billion tons. One of the causes of the thaw is believed to be the influx of relatively warm water brought by ocean currents.
Thwaites is considered particularly vulnerable in the context of global warming, and scientists are trying to figure out exactly how quickly any change could occur.
Experts say that Thwaites is the most important glacier on the planet. Due to its size and the vulnerability found in recent years, it was baptized as “the glacier of the Apocalypse.”
