Antarctica's 'Doomsday Glacier' could meet its doom within 3 years | Hacker News Reader

Antarctica's 'Doomsday Glacier' could meet its doom within 3 years

livescience.com

36 pointswglb41 comments

Sorry doomsters, but if the Thwaites Glacier is melting, it's not down to us pesky humans - it's down to the significant geothermal heat flow beneath it.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-021-00242-3 : Article Publication Date: 17-Aug-2021

Yes, geothermal heat is a thing, but it always was a thing. The linked paper does not explain what has changed in the last few decades to cause this thinning/melt to happen now.

Is the geothermal heat weakening the sea plug that keeps the land portion in check?

The timing seems suspect, is there new volcanic activity that explains this geothermal heating?

It's nice that there's an article in nature, but this is geology occurring under miles thick ice. I have my doubts that "geothermal heat flow" is responsible for threatening a glacier that can raise the sea level 10 feet.

> sea levels worldwide would rise by more than 2 feet (65 centimeters) .... "And it could lead to even more sea-level rise, up to 10 feet [3 m], if it draws the surrounding glaciers with it," ... But the timeframe for those changes will be decades rather than a handful of years, according to the briefing.

I wonder. If sea level rises 65 cm, will it help to loosen other glaciers elsewhere in Antarctic and Greenland?

bigger picture, via IPCC6:

"There has been no significant trend in Antarctic sea ice area from 1979 to 2020 due to regionally opposing trends and large internal variability. Human influence very likely contributed to the decrease in Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover since 1950. It is very likely that human influence has contributed to the observed surface melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet over the past two decades, but there is only limited evidence, with medium agreement, of human influence on the Antarctic Ice Sheet mass loss."

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...

Wait, I thought the IPCC was at the center of climate change study and reporting. Does this contradict my friends who have told me NYC will be underwater in 20 years?

if you read that document it is a very measured kind of rhetoric about the various dimensions of global warming ... they even have a section where they lay out exactly what terms such as "likely, very likely" etc. actually mean in terms of percentages...

Interesting. I'll just have to read it I guess. Is this sort of a scientific gold standard on that 99% consensus I hear about?

I think so yes. the "summary for policymakers" is as far as I've gotten but I feel it gives a good snapshot of the current mainstream view.

“Oh well”, that’s pretty much all I saw happen at COP26.

Please quit with the ridiculous hyperbole.

The glacier has significant geothermal activity beneath it, which is the cause of any potential melting. Nothing to do with alleged human activity.

What could humans do about that? Install a giant fridge there?

Cop 26 being a flop is hyperbole now?

Of course this event would be a lot less significant if everything else around it was not already melting or we were in the process of stopping any further melting.

What can be done at this point to prevent this iceberg drifting away to even warmer waters and splitting up then melting faster. Seems like we've gone past the point of no return.

The melting of floating ice raises the ocean level only 2.6% relative to displacement. If all the extant sea ice and floating shelf ice melted, the global sea level would rise about 4 cm.

The sliding of grounded ice into the sea is what raises sea levels.

I'm going to make a point to check back in 3 years and if the glacier is still there, put this article in the failed alarmist prediction file (which is quite fat already).

How dare you! /s

Just the one file? I've been hearing this story since 1988. The screeching just gets a little louder year by year. :)

> Just the one file? I've been hearing this story since 1988.

"If the earth is on a warming trend, we're not likely to detect it before 1995."

-- 1982 Exxon Memo to Management About CO2 Greenhouse Effect [1]

[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2805576-1982-Exxon-M...

"Doomsday Glacier".

At some point we'll run out of hyperbole right? What could be worse than doomsday? Perhaps, apocalypse? Maybe cataclysm?

I think it's a good word for 2-10 feet of sea level rise.

Not to belittle the impact, but I don't think this is "doom". If even 5 feet over normal high tide makes a difference with where you are on the coast, then you are experiencing frequent seasonal flooding, and are almost certainly getting completely devistated every 20-50 years. Coastal people, that near to the waterline, understand that they're on borrowed time. The time between being leveled will definitely decrease, but it's in the cultural memory in these places. It's not going to be doom, because it's not going to be some unforeseen transient in their experience. They're not going to have structures they expect to be there next winter within 4ft of sea level. It'll be more frequent devastation, with a slow, eventual, loss of will to put up with it. But, it will be slow. A 2ft transient isn't going to destroy anything, except areas that get destroyed multiple times a year already.

Imagine if you lived on a pacific island, too bad I guess ?

Yes, this is one of the areas that are flooded seasonally, and devastated every 20-50 years. To put it into perspective, the tidal range in the pacific islands is around 2 feet. Yearly storm surges go from 5 to 20 ft (hurricane required for the upper range). This is why there are surprisingly few buildings at risk [1]. Nobody builds/rebuilds where frequent destruction happens. People are smarter than that. People will slowly move inland, which is unfortunate to those at the perimiter. But I don't think this is "doom".

1. https://cop23.unfccc.int/climate-action/momentum-for-change/...

Without minimizing the seriousness of what it is... "Doomsday"? For two feet of sealevel rise? (And over 80 years, if rsj_hn is correct?) No. Just no. You have way too wimpy an idea of Doomsday.

2 feet of sea level rise could easily end civilisation as we know it.

I'm calling BS on that.

If it's not BS, let's hear your mechanism.

IPCC v5 is predicting .3 to 0.6 meters of sea level rise by 2100. That's about 1-2 feet over the next 80 years.

Maybe we can stop with the extremism, especially for something as well measured as sea-level.

These studies from The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration go into new next IPCC assessments.

Massive localized events resulting from geographic features are not part of current IPCC models.

That's fine and I'm all for new theories and new models, but let's let them actually make it into the IPCC and see how they are peer reviewed, how the findings are reproduced and assessed by other scientists, etc, especially before multiplying current consensus estimates by a factor of 10. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all that.

given that the melting of the thing could cause ocean levels to rise by up to amost a meter (or even more if it has a cascading effect on other ice masses in the area) that is actually appropriately named.

Utter nonsense, and goes against any known physics.

If an iceberg is already floating in the ocean, then it has already displaced that ocean by an amount.

Just in exactly the same way an ice cube has already displaced surrounding water in a glass.

If or when the aforementioned iceberg melts, there will be no further raising of sea level - because the level was already displaced.

Same as with the ice cube in the glass of water.

If you've read the article you will have found the explanation there. The problem isn't the already floating ice, which indeed does not rise the sea level, but the land ice the floating mass is attached to.

And that's because of the high geothermal activity underneath the glacier. [0]

Nothing to do with cLiMaTe ChAnGe.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-021-00242-3 - "High geothermal heat flow beneath Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica inferred from aeromagnetic data" - 17-Aug-2021

Climate change is one contributor to the dynamics of that glacier, so yes it has a lot to do with it, but either way this has nothing to do with your original post, in which you apparently weren't even aware of the fact that the melting of the glacier would rise the sea level which your provided source also states, so I'm glad we have at least made progress on that front.

This user is pasting this one study all over this thread, and now has mockery and belittlement. He's likely an astroturf troll.

OK, then what do you call something astronomically worse than this, say a mile wide astroid strike?

You see that you have no more granularity? That you can't describe it as worse than a meter of sea level rise?

I don't think we need more granularity, but you could propose a more appropriate word for a global catastrophe of this scale then.

"Rising from the Antarctic, a Climate Alarm"[1] was a much much more interesting article that covered way more than the simple, superficial change in sea-level that this article focuses upon. It talked about the antarctic's impact on carbon-capture/carbon-release, and plenty of other nuanced climate issues. That there's short/medium term threat of this glacier potentially rising sea levels seems pale in comparison to the total net climate impact we could be facing. Where-as this "doomsday" article focuses on a single symptom of the gaian ecosystem being deeply out of whack.

> By some estimates the oceans have taken up about 25 percent of the excess carbon dioxide, and more than 90 percent of the excess heat, that has resulted from burning of fossil fuels and other human activities since the 19th century. But the deep ocean water that upwells around Antarctica contains even more carbon dioxide — not from current emissions, but dissolved over centuries from organic matter including decaying marine organisms, tiny and immense, that sink when they die.

For what it's worth, nearly every article is focused around the ocean-level rises. WaPo article[2] was similar, so was science.org[3] (although some really good details on the situation/research) here.

One random thing I'll note, the science.org article showed a map of the area of concern, & wow, it's remarkable what a vast area of glacier could run out to sea via a relatively-small <200 km ice-wall giving way, failing to retain the continent's ice. It sounds absurd but, like... can we reinforce/build a man made retaining wall?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/13/climate/antar... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29550920 (9 hours ago, 0 comments)

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/12/1... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29555411 (15 hours ago, 0 comments)

[3] https://www.science.org/content/article/ice-shelf-holding-ba... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29546875 (21 hours ago, 42 comments)

When the whole of Antarctica melts, as seems inevitable, sea levels will rise 70 meters.

Honestly I kind of think it's a good thing - humans and their civilisation have been such poor stewards of the world that we really need to be moved on.

Ahh the wonders of this human condition and our inability as a species to not prevent the sell out of our future generations. We consider ourselves the most intelligent species on earth.

Although terrifying, a map showing exposure would be fascinating. As an aside, this makes me instantly think of an old movie, Waterworld with Kevin Costner.

https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/

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