PFEIFFER: So you say it's unsettling, if not alarming. We're taking away this resistive force that's holding it back and allowing it to accelerate. So what this is doing is taking away a bit of resistance, a stabilizing feature of the lower part of the glacier, sort of like a dam that's holding back water. This is not going to cause instant sea level rise. PETTIT: My sense of alarm is it's unsettling. PFEIFFER: For you, as someone who studies this, what's your sense of alarm as you watch this? And the lower part of this glacier looks like it might do over the next few years is shatter into hundreds of icebergs. But it's bringing that warm, deep water up to the ice, and it's causing it to melt from the underside. That is bringing up this warm, deep water that normally doesn't have access to the ice. That's creating different winds, and those winds are causing different currents in the ocean. She explains why.ĮRIN PETTIT: Temperatures are rising in the atmosphere. Pettit says the Thwaites Glacier is like a huge river of ice draining into the ocean, and it's happening at a troubling rate. She's a glaciologist at Oregon State University, and she's been studying this particular glacier for decades. Erin Pettit is part of that group, called the International Thwaites Glacier collaboration. This week, a group of scientists announced findings that it could collapse within five years. Scientists have been observing it for decades because it's become a case study in how human-driven climate change is felt most on the Earth's poles.
That's earned it the nickname The Doomsday Glacier. It sits on the western edge of Antarctica, and it's responsible for 4% of the world's sea level rise. The Thwaites Glacier is an ice shelf the size of Florida. Near the southern tip of this planet, the world's widest glacier is on the verge of collapse.
0 kommentar(er)
