Our Melting Antartic Glacier

As icebergs drifted by his Antarctica-bound ship, David Holland spoke this week of how the melting glacier he’s cruising towards may contain warning signals for the coasts of far-off Canada.

The atmospheric and ocean scientist from Newfoundland is part of an expedition to one of the world’s most frigid and remote spots – the Thwaites glacier in the western portion of the continent – where he’ll measure water temperatures in an undersea channel the size of Manhattan.

“The question of whether sea level will change can only be answered by looking at the planet where it matters, and that is at Thwaites,” said Holland, director of the environmental fluid dynamics laboratory at New York University, during a satellite phone interview from aboard the South Korean icebreaker Araon.

It’s over 16,000 kilometres from Holland’s hometown in Brigus, N.L., on Conception Bay, to the site about 100 kilometres inland from the “grounding zone” where the Thwaites’ glacier leaves the continent and extends over the Pacific.

The team’s 20,000 tonnes of drilling gear will be assembled to measure the temperatures, salinity and turbulence of the Pacific waters that have crept underneath and are lapping away at the guts of the glacier.

“If it (the water) is above freezing, and in salt water this means above -2 centigrade, that’s not sustainable. A glacier can’t survive that,” said Holland.

Since 2018, more than 60 scientists from the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration group have been exploring the ocean and marine sediments, measuring warming currents flowing toward the deep ice, and examining the stretching, bending, and grinding of the glacier over the landscape below.

The Florida-sized Thwaites glacier faces the Amundsen Sea, and researchers have suggested in journal articles over the past decade it may eventually lose large amounts of ice because of deep, warm water driven into the area as the planet warms. Some media have dubbed Thwaites the “doomsday glacier” due to estimates that it could add about 65 centimetres to global sea level rise.  READ MORE...