How a Glacier is about to bring Doomsday in reality? 🏔️

The Thwaites glacier, popularly known as Doomsday glacier in West Antarctica is one of the biggest glaciers in Antarctica. It is so massive that it contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by 65 cm if it were to completely collapse. And, the worrying part is that recent research suggests that its long-term stability is doubtful as the glacier is shedding more and more ice.

Adding 65cm to global sea levels would redefine the coastlines of many countries and many coastal metropolitan cities, like New York, Tokyo, Mumbai and Shanghai, will go the Atlantis way. There’s been around 20cm of sea-level rise since 1900, forcing coastal communities out of their homes and exacerbating environmental problems such as flooding, saltwater contamination and habitat loss.

But the worry is that Thwaites, because of its key location, might not be the only glacier to go. It could trigger a regional chain reaction and drag other nearby glaciers in with it, which would mean several meters of sea-level rise. A rise of even a couple of meters in the sea levels is enough to swallow up low-lying island nations like Kiribati, Tuvalu, and the Maldives.

Doomsday is as big as Britain

Thwaites is a frozen river of ice approximately the size of Britain. It is already contributing around 4% of the global sea-level rise. Since 2000, the glacier has had more than 1000 billion tons of ice and has increased steadily over the last three decades. The speed of its flow has doubled in 30 years, meaning twice as much ice is being spewed into the ocean as in the 1990s.

Widest glacier in the world with a 80 mile width, is held back by a floating platform of ice called an ice shelf, which restrains the glacier and makes it flow less quickly. But in recent studies scientists confirmed that this ice shelf is rapidly destablizing. The eastern ice shelf now has cracks, and could collapse within ten years. This kind of cracking and fracturing can promote further weakening, priming the ice shelf for disintegration.
If Thwaites’ ice shelf did collapse, it would spell the beginning of the end for the glacier. Without its ice shelf, Thwaites glacier would discharge all its ice into the ocean over the following decades to centuries.