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A glacier the size of Florida is on track to change the course of human civilization.


Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica is enormous and is often referred to as the most dangerous glacier on Earth. It has also been dubbed the Doomsday glacier. The glacier holds two feet of sea level but, more importantly, it is the “backstop” for four other glaciers which holds an additional 10-13 feet of sea level rise. When Thwaites collapses it will take most of West Antarctica with it. This is not new information for those of us that follow the science. For example, Eric Rignot in 2014, stated that the loss of West Antarctica is unstoppable. (You can listen to an excellent interview from 2019 between Rignot and Radio Eco-shock on Antarctica).

According to researchers at the University of Washington back in 2014, Thwaites is already collapsing. “The simulations indicate that early-stage collapse has begun,” notes their news presser. What’s more, the Thwaites Glacier is a “linchpin” for the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet; its rapid collapse would “probably spill over to adjacent catchments, undermining much of West Antarctica.”

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory made news this past January by revealing that there is a massive cavity that has been carved into the underbelly of the glacier by warm ocean water —  raising alarms that the chunk of ice could collapse and disintegrate.

The cavity reportedly has an area the size of two-thirds of a Manhattan and, it as tall as a 100 story building, at 1000 feet.

The newfound hole had held fourteen billion tons of ice and, NASA observed that the horrifying melt and decay was not there just three short years ago.

It was NASA’s Icebridge program that made the discovery using ice-penetrating radar through the miles deep glacier, as well as, ”data from a constellation of Italian and German spaceborne synthetic aperture radars”.

But that was just one of the terrors that the satellites found, it confirmed fears that “Thwaites was not attached to the bedrock”.


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