An unexpected collapse in East Antarctica highlights the importance of—and uncertainty about—the continent’s ice shelves, which act like bottle stoppers controlling the flow of ice from land to sea
s. The question is whether that change will take centuries to play out, reshaping coastlines slowly enough that communities might adapt, or whether it will happen faster.
Unlike most of the ice sheets in Greenland and East Antarctica, most of the West Antarctic one sits on bedrock that lies below sea level. The ice,in some places, overflows a deep basin, only the rim of which pokes up above current sea level. Beyond the rim the ice meets the ocean at the “grounding zone”—a giant underwater wall that rises from the seafloor. At the surface the ice continues out to sea as a floating shelf, a bit like a mushroom cap.
—a very real possibility in the Thwaites Basin—they might start to catastrophically collapse, accelerating the retreat and exposing ever taller ice cliffs, and so on. Like the marine ice shelf instability, but on steroids. The first step in the disintegration of the Thwaites glacier is the disintegration of its protective ice shelves, which buttress it and slow its inexorable slide into the sea. They have already disappeared along two-thirds of the glacier’s 75-mile-long coastline. In those places, ice flows away three times as fast.
This part of the ice shelf, Pettit explains, is shot through with thin breaks that are barely holding together. It is “likely to shatter into hundreds of icebergs, just like your car window,” she says. That disintegration is likely within the decade and possible as soon as three years from now.
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