“I visualize it somewhat similar to that car window where you have a few cracks that are slowly propagating, and then suddenly you go over a bump in your car and the whole thing just starts to shatter in every direction,” said Erin Pettit, a glaciologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, on 13 December at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting.
They have appeared in satellite images over the past few years and their growth seems to be accelerating.
The recently identified fractures are deep, fast-moving cracks in Thwaites’s eastern ice shelf (see ‘Cracking up’). If that happens, in what had been considered a relatively stable part of Thwaites, the glacier could release an armada of icebergs and begin flowing much faster into the ocean, funnelling ice that had been resting on land into the sea, where it would contribute to sea-level rise.įor decades, scientists have carefully tracked changes in the Thwaites Glacier, which already loses around 50 billion tonnes of ice each year and causes 4% of global sea-level rise. Giant fractures in the floating ice of Antarctica’s massive Thwaites Glacier - a fast-melting formation that has become an icon of climate change - could shatter part of the shelf within five years, research suggests. The Thwaites Glacier’s fractures were identified in satellite imagery.
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