Micro-Climate Blog: Ghosts and Glaciers

By Marcy Rockman, Lifting Rocks Climate and Heritage Consulting, for the SHA Climate Heritage Initiative

There are traditions that say Halloween is when the separation between worlds is at its thinnest. Now it is a time of ghosts and ghouls and scary things that can go bump in the night. Stories of melting of glaciers in West Antarctica feel appropriate for today on both accounts. 

My feature story today is a summary of new research at Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), a consortium of the US and UK with South Korea, Germany, and Sweden, has been studying Thwaites closely for six years. Their findings are showing not only that Thwaites is retreating and that retreat is accelerating, their work is showing how warmer ocean waters are being drawn under the glacier and the specific effects it is having on the ice. Currently, Thwaites is projected to collapse within 200 years. While recent modeling suggests that a domino-like cascade failure of ice cliffs is less likely than previously thought, this does not mean that the glacier is safe.

Thwaites Glacier itself holds enough water to raise global sea levels by 2 feet (0.6 m). Its collapse, however, could lead to further loss of ice sheets across Antarctica, generating 10 feet (3 m) of sea level rise.

This will be devastating in so many ways. Archaeologically speaking, the most wide-ranging study of sea level impacts on sites in the US is a 2017 study by David Anderson and co-authors. In this, a 1 m (3.2 feet) of sea level rise will result in loss of more than 13,000 known archaeological sites across the US southeastern states alone; higher sea levels and effects of movement of people and infrastructure inland will affect far more.

I think that’s plenty of scary to be getting on with. 

Featured Link: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/20/climate/doomsday-glacier-thwaites-melt-sea-level-rise/index.html

For a listing of all blog posts in this series, visit our Climate Heritage Initiative page.

Photo credit:

High cliffs of Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica (photo taken by Rob Larter, British Antarctic Survey, published at the Featured Link).