Cool Website - The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration
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At around 120 km wide, Thwaites Glacier is one of the largest glaciers on Earth and one of the most fragile in Antarctica. It is the focus of much international research through the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), funded jointly by the UK National Environment Research Council (NERC) and US National Science Foundation (NSF), and ESA’s 4D Antarctica project.
ESA’s Diego Fernandez, head of the Earth Observation Science Section and overseeing the 4D Antarctica project, said, “The project draws together several years of research from different teams to form a new comprehensive assessment of Antarctic ice-sheet hydrological processes – from the lithosphere and subglacial environment to surface-melting process.”
Experts analyzed more than 10 years’ worth of altimetry data from ESA’s CryoSat satellite and were surprised to discover that the lakes beneath Thwaites Glacier, the largest of which is over 40 km long, drained and recharged again in quick succession, in 2013 and then in 2017.
This kind of drainage under Thwaites Glacier has not previously been recorded. The peak drainage was estimated at about 500 cubic metres a second – around eight times greater than the average discharge of River Thames in England into the North Sea.
George Malczyk, lead author at the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh in the UK, said, “We used CryoSat to show a period of lake activity only four years after the previous drainage event in 2013.
“But what is interesting about this second drainage event is how different it is from the first, with a faster transfer of water and increased water discharge. Our observations highlight that there were potentially significant modifications to the subglacial system between these two events.”
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https://thwaitesglacier.org/news/satellite-insight-subglacial-lakes
Homepage:
https://thwaitesglacier.org/