A 'doomsday glacier' the size of Florida is disintegrating faster than thought

[TeamProg]

Source: Washington Post


Thwaites Glacier, known as the “doomsday glacier” for the risk it poses to global sea levels, is retreating faster than previously thought, study shows


A large glacier in Antarctica that could raise sea levels several feet is disintegrating faster than last predicted, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The Thwaites Glacier — dubbed the “doomsday glacier” because scientists estimate that without it and its supporting ice shelves, sea levels could rise more than 3 to 10 feet — lies in the western part of the continent. After recently mapping it in high-resolution, a group of international researchers found that the glacial expanse experienced a phase of “rapid retreat” sometime in the past two centuries — over a duration of less than six months.

According to a news release accompanying the study, researchers concluded that the glacier had “lost contact with a seabed ridge” and is now retreating at a speed of 1.3 miles per year — a rate double what they predicted between 2011 and 2019.

Unlike some other glaciers that are connected to dry land, Thwaites is grounded in the seabed, making it more vulnerable to warming waters as a result of human-induced climate change. Thwaites already accounts for about 4 percent of annual sea level rise.

Crucial Antarctic ice shelf could fail within five years, scientists say

“You can’t take away Thwaites and leave the rest of Antarctica intact,” said Alastair Graham, a marine geologist at the University of South Florida and the co-author of the study, in a phone interview.

He described the consequences of losing Thwaites “existential.”

According to the United Nations, more than 40 percent of the world’s human population lives within 60 miles of the coast — areas that will be hit hard by rising tides.



Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/06/thwaites-doomsday-glacier-antarctica-disintegrating/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F37dab80%2F6318c1e9b8c9803d3031c162%2F5fe8e448ade4e21670bc1e37%2F61%2F72%2F6318c1e9b8c9803d3031c162&wp_cu=60f2bb1091ae212e4780171c46d0ace6%7CB7783B4ED096293AE0530100007F2A97

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But of course !

[BradAllison]

1. Governor DeathSentence will demand to be named emperor of it. n/m

[GreenWave]

18. Good! Put his throne right on top of it.

[TheRealNorth]

2. If that thing melted completely.....

I wonder how much of FL will be submerged.

[TeamProg]

3. Too much or NOT enough depending on your views.. n/t

[LudwigPastorius]

12. Almost everything south of I-75.

(Also Cape Coral, Galveston, everything between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Charleston, Norfolk, Chesapeake, Virginia Beach, Newark, Jersey City, Hoboken, Teterboro, Hudson Square, the 9/11 Memorial, Ellis Island, The Battery, Long Island City, East Williamsburg, Coney Island, JFK Airport, a good part of Boston)

https://coastal.climatecentral.org/map/9/-90.3413/29.5963/?theme=water_level&map_type=water_level_above_mhhw&basemap=roadmap&contiguous=true&elevation_model=best_available&refresh=true&water_level=10.0&water_unit=ft

[Old Crank]

16. This isn't all of Florida

Just the Miami area. More poking around the site will show more places.

You can see sea level rise from 0-10 feet.

https://ss2.climatecentral.org/#10/25.7548/-80.2318?show=satellite&projections=0-K14_RCP85-SLR&level=1&unit=feet&pois=hide

[Joinfortmill]

23. Thanks

[Native]

4. Everything climate related is happening faster than thought.

[Fullduplexxx]

5. Science is so much , bigger than we though , faster than we thought

Worse than we thought ,

[Hugh_Lebowski]

6. I'm hereby predicting that the Denialist's tack is suddenly going to change from

Before:
Global Warming isn't real (or if it is, it's WAY in the future), it's alarmist nonsense from corrupt scientists paid off by Soros!!!1!!

After:
Scientists corrupted by Soros FAILED to tell us all how bad this was going to be, earlier, putting the world in grave danger!!!1!!

And they'll do it without the slightest trace of irony, as always.

What they'll really be saying is "I thought this was far enough off in the future that it wouldn't affect me, so I was a denialist cause I thought it would screw me over personally if it were accepted, so I denied it! Now that it looks like *I* may be affected after all, I'm going to front and gaslight about the whole thing"

Because that appears to be instinctual for them.

[bahboo]

9. sadly agree...

[TheRealNorth]

14. Yup

It will be like the 2nd Iraq war where all of a sudden it is the Democrat's fault for invading Iraq.

[LT Barclay]

24. I think that has already started, I've read elsewhere that some are already saying that we can't do

anything so why bother. And then there is the corporate element that is looking for the profit angle as Naomi Klein calls "Disaster Capitalism".

Just sent this article to Boat US (a magazine for boaters of course from an organization that offers boat insurance, kind of an on the water AAA) because their latest magazine had an article about the future impacts of global warming along with a loving portrayal of William F. Buckley that was an excerpt from his son's book. I told them it was perversely ironic.

[Kaleva]

28. I see that attitude here. That nothing can be done to succesfully

adapt so there's no point in trying.

[2naSalit]

7. It's too late already.

[Moostache]

8. Sadly, I agree.

The time to act and prevent destruction and mayhem was 30 years ago.

The CO2 and other gases (Nitrous oxide, Methane, etc.) in the atmosphere already are STILL increasing annually, and will remain on an uptick for DECADES from now...the worst is yet to come, but is already set in stone. The warmer condition today is already baked in (pun intended) to the next few decades; and the mission is changed from prevention to survival.

If one were inclined to be a purely capitalist jerk off about this, they might do well to take a serious look at geographical surveys and decide what areas of current coastal property and arable land up the Mississippi will flood and how far and try to buy up currently worthless land in anticipation of new coastlines and property values in the future.

Current coastal property in many places is going bye-bye into the sea and there won't be much (if anything) that can prevent this any longer. We were warned, but the warnings that told the truth of the expected consequences of inaction were watered down to avoid creating a panic. Scientists have known all along what the models truly meant and how royally fucked the current economic and social paradigm truly is...when things go south, they are going to go like the gravity-assisted fall of a roller coaster.

Anyone know that feeling of reaching the top, just before the free-fall of the coaster takes you? Well, that's what we are living in right now. What comes next is truly terrifying and for BILLIONS of the poorest humans is going to be fatal.

[LT Barclay]

25. Your last paragraph states things well. Every day I hear about disasters elsewhere and I'm amazed

at how people around me continue as if nothing unusual is happening. Similar to the feeling I get when I still wear a mask and everyone acts as if it has all gone away.
Both things also remind me of the Poe story "The Masque of the Red Death". Alan Parsons did a concept album based on Poe stories, I wish he'd go back and cover this story now.

[TeamProg]

10. Yeah.. thawing frozen methane will keep releasing carbon for a long time coming. Less surface ice to

reflect heat back into space. And the simple expansion of the water itself due to increased temps.

It's not looking very good at all.

[Warpy]

11. It most likely is too late, barring a calamitous volcanic eruption

that cools us back down for a couple of centuries. Even then, the repair will only be temporary.

The best we can hope for is a slow, steady rise instead of a sudden, catastrophic one. The former will allow us to start moving infrastructure like container ports and low lying parts of cities likely to be inundated, but I'm afraid large parts of Florida will be sunk. My mother would be pleased by that.

[2naSalit]

15. I don't think it's going to go down llike that...

Last edited Wed Sep 7, 2022, 05:24 PM - Edit history (1)

I think it will be a series of sudden, catastrophic events that exacerbate each other. We'll be gone long before it's over. As for volcanoes, I think that the ejecta will kill off aerobic life forms in a short time, that includes us.

[Warpy]

17. If Toba didn't do it, it's unlikely a 200 year cooling event eruption would

The Toba eruption cooled things off for a millennium. Originally, it was thought the human population had been reduced to a relative handful, but now they're discovering populations that actually thrived, from deep valleys in northern India to western South Africa.

I think what you're referencing would be a massive flood basalt event like the one that produced the Siberian Traps or the Deccan Traps. Those can be heating events as much as cooling events, and that is what caused mass extinctions, the combination of the two. Those happen very rarely and unfold fairly slowly, taking thousands or even a million years to complete.

[2naSalit]

21. I'm not talking sheild volcanoes...

I'm talking eruptive ones. I am fatally close to the Yellowstone caldera and certainly on top of the massive magma pools underneath, when that goes, not many will survive as the ash cloud will surround the planet in a day or two and the glass content of that will take out most aerobic life. Another couple magma pools are situated in other locations, any one of them could do us all in.

[Kaleva]

29. Too late to stop it but not too late to adapt or at least try.

A few years ago, I asked Admin on a couple of occasions on the possibility of forming a Climate Change preparedness group but got no response.

Right now, I post about my efforts in the Rural Life, Gardening, and Frugal Living groups so it's kind of spread out.

[BlueWavePsych]

13. Yup, climate change is just a liberal hoax ...

[GreenWave]

19. Water does not spread evenly across our oceans!

It has peaks and valleys.

There are coastal cities in Brazil experiencing the Atlantic now and losing. Many other such places.

[LT Barclay]

26. You sound like you might be able to direct me to an answer to a question that has been vexing me,

Where does the mass for tides come from? As fast as tides travel, I don't understand how the mass can move that fast. Why wouldn't there be supersonic currents in the ocean?
Been bugging me for a while. Like when I was a kid, how can the universe be endless, but if it ended, what would he boundary be, and what would be on the other side? Used to give me a headache until I learned to shut down the question .

[GreenWave]

30. I just gather info

I do not understand the mechanisms by which, even the atmosphere has peaks and valleys...

I am guessing here,

but tides and lunar pulls seem to be related. Water provides a smoother environment allowing for faster motions such as when a volcano erupts and liquefies the land around causing the (forgotten the word here but it is a mass of liquid and gas) to flow at a very deadly 500mph.

There are tremendous waves under the surface of the oceans that never break the top. What on Earth had a show dealing with rogue waves.

I think our mistake with the cosmos has been repeated. Science once believed in a one galaxy cosmos which we know is immensely wrong today. So the mistake is forcing the next "one" into a word "uni" universe. As William Shatner pointed out in one of his shows (I think Weird or what?) that we can now identify 4 bruises in our cosmos at what are thought to be edges. Bruised by what is the question.

I am also perplexed but by the opposite, how can anything ever exist? Why isn't there just nothing at all? I think it is time for my large cup of Death Wish coffee!

I do think if you search under rogue waves you will get close to your answer.

[Chainfire]

20. The right has a solution; look the other way and jail the scientists.

That, with a little prayer, should fix it.

[Hekate]

22. I never really wanted a beachfront home, but it looks like I may get one. Better leave the kids ...

…a rowboat to use from the end of the street.

[purr-rat beauty]

27. We become food

Unbeknownst to us we are making fossil fuel for the the next apex generation