6.5 Mile Crack In Pine Island Glacier (WAIS) Opened At 80 MPH, Scientists' Calculations Show

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Miles and Bingham’s findings confirmed that Pine Island Glacier was thinning sooner than most Antarctic ice shelves. Out of roughly 600 pinning points that the researchers tracked, only 15 percent shrank in size from 1973 to 1989, including those on Pine Island Glacier. That number grew to 25 percent between 1990 and 2000, and 37 percent between 2000 and 2022. The image above, acquired with the OLI-2 (Operational Land Imager-2) on Landsat 9, shows Pine Island Glacier’s ice shelf in January 2024. By then, the smooth, thinning shelf had lost additional ice along its front and northern margin, and fractured ice was visible along the southern edge.With Pine Island Glacier at or near the point of being completely unanchored, its ability to buttress ice has already been minimized. The “greater concern,” Miles and Bingham pointed out in their paper, might be the other major ice shelves that are still heavily anchored but showing signs of quickly losing their pinning points. NASA

Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica's highly vulnerable Amundsen Sea Embayment a 2014 rift was under study by satellite with seismic data taken from instruments on the ice shelf when a massive rift was found to have "shattered like glass" for 6.5 miles at 80 mph. If other rifts are doing the same, sea level rise could occur much faster than anyone had thought possible. Ice shelves provide the critical ability to cork the inland ice streams from dumping into the ocean and raising sea levels on the world's coastlines.

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Satellite images taken May 8 (left) and May 11 (right), three days apart in 2012, show a new crack that forms a "Y" branching off to the left of the previous rift. Three seismic instruments (black triangles) recorded vibrations that were used to calculate rift propagation speeds of up to 80 miles per hour. Credit: Olinger et

A critical question is how warmer oceans might cause glaciers to break apart more quickly. University of Washington researchers have demonstrated the fastest-known large-scale breakage along an Antarctic ice shelf. Their study, recently published in AGU Advances, shows that a 6.5-mile (10.5 kilometer) crack formed in 2012 on Pine Island Glacier—a retreating ice shelf that holds back the larger West Antarctic ice sheet—in about five and a half minutes. That means the rift opened at about 115 feet (35 meters) per second, or about 80 miles per hour.

"This is to our knowledge the fastest rift-opening event that's ever been observed," said lead author Stephanie Olinger, who did the work as part of her doctoral research at the UW and Harvard University, and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. "This shows that under certain circumstances, an ice shelf can shatter. It tells us we need to look out for this type of behavior in the future, and it informs how we might go about describing these fractures in large-scale ice sheet models."

EDIT

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/3/2/2226946/-Scientists-found-that-a-fracture-at-Pine-Island-Glacier-opened-at-80-mph?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web

[global1]

1. An Incovenient Truth......nt

[Think. Again.]

2. and don't look up...

...in fact, let's just outright deny what 98% of climate scientist are trying to warn us about and start claiming it won't be that bad.