If Thwaites Glacier collapses, global coastlines could change forever
Days after the Nathaniel B. Palmer became the first ship to sail across the 75-mile face of West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier, a piece of its floating ice shelf bigger than Manhattan crumbled off the glacier into a flotilla of icebergs.
Scientists aboard noticed something had changed when the research vessel tried to navigate to a spot in front of the Florida-sized glacier and was blocked by ice-choked seas.
“What we didn’t realize at the time is the ice [front] was coming out to chase us out,” said Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey and chief scientist on the ship. “The entire embayment where we’d been working for several days was littered with icebergs.”
Satellite images soon showed where these icebergs were coming from. A roughly 20-mile stretch of Thwaites had fractured into mile-long icebergs that were now being blown out into the bay in front of Thwaites.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/if-thwaites-glacier-collapses-global-coastlines-could-change-forever/ar-AADHFg5?li=BBnb7Kz
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