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Two major Antarctic glaciers are tearing loose from their restraints, scientists say - The Washington Post

Two major Antarctic glaciers are tearing loose from their restraints, scientists say - The Washington Post

Two major Antarctic glaciers are tearing loose from their restraints, scientists say - The Washington Post
Sep 14, 2020 1 min, 15 secs

Located along the coast of the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica, the enormous Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers already contribute around 5 percent of global sea-level rise.

“We already knew that these were glaciers that might matter in the future, but these images to me indicate that these ice shelves are in a very bad state,” Lhermitte said.

That’s what’s now happening in West Antarctica, the new research argues, suggesting that warm ocean water has thinned the ice shelves out enough from below that they became brittle.

For the Pine Island Glacier, the new study finds that while the cracking and fraying at the shear margin dates to 1999, it accelerated in 2016.

Alley noted that the processes playing out in Antarctica appear to have already reached their completion in parts of Greenland, where one of the largest glaciers, Jakobshavn, no longer has any significant ice shelf at all.

The 79 North glacier still has a major ice shelf, as do some of Greenland’s other northernmost glaciers, but many of these have lost considerable size in recent decades.

If a similar process plays out in the Amundsen Sea of West Antarctica, where Pine Island and Thwaites are, the sea-level consequences could be enormous.

Lhermitte provided calculations showing that over the past six years, the western and central parts of the Pine Island ice shelf have shrunk by about 30 percent, from about 1,500 square miles down to closer to 1,000 square miles.

“These are the first signs we see that Pine Island ice shelf is disappearing

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