The problem is, understanding what’s going on at Thwaites is fiendishly complex. Or to put it more urgently: “If there is going to be a climate catastrophe,” Ohio State glaciologist Ian Howat once told me, “it’s probably going to start at Thwaites.” Alley adds: “The most likely place to generate is Thwaites.” “The difference between those is a lot of lives and money,” says Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State University and one of the great ice scientists of our time. Depending on various emissions scenarios in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, we could have as little as one foot of sea level rise by the end of the century, or nearly six feet of sea level rise (of course, rising seas won’t stop in 2100, but that date has become a common benchmark). It’s not only goodbye Miami, but goodbye to virtually every low-lying coastal city in the world.īut predicting the breakup of ice sheets and the implications for future sea level rise is fraught with uncertainty. Ten feet of sea level rise would be a world-bending catastrophe. Globally, 250 million people live within three feet of high tide lines. If Thwaites Glacier collapses, it opens the door for the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet to slide into the sea. But in fact, the West Antarctic ice sheet is one of the most important tipping points in the Earth’s climate system. Given the ongoing war for American democracy and the deadly toll of the Covid pandemic, the loss of an ice shelf on a far-away continent populated by penguins might not seem to be big news.
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