Antarctica’s ‘doomsday glacier’ began melting in mid-twentieth century: Study

West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier, commonly known as the “Doomsday Glacier” because of the potentially catastrophic effects it has been hypothesized, could collapse, scientists say, according to new research published Monday. It began to recede rapidly and earlier than I had previously known.

new studyA paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences used new satellite technology to conclude that rapid melting of the glaciers likely began in the 1940s.

Scientists had already observed accelerating glacier retreat by the 1970s, but they weren’t sure when it started.

Combined with Thwaites’ previous research on the adjacent Pine Island Glacier, this study also provides potentially alarming new insights into the causes of glacier melt.

Scientists have attempted to reconstruct the history of the glaciers using analysis of oceanic sedimentary records, showing that Thwaites Glacier and Pine Island Glacier both lost contact with the ocean floor at about the same time in the 1940s. discovered.

Scientists found that these significant changes occurred against the backdrop of a large-scale El Niño event, indicating that the glaciers were “responsing to the same driving forces.”

“The synchronous ice retreat of these two major ice streams indicates that the retreat in the drainage sector of the Amundsen Sea is not caused by internal dynamics specific to each glacier, but rather due to external oceanographic and atmospheric factors. Recent modeling studies show that these are regulated by climate variability,” the study reads.

Scientists say the continued retreat of glaciers shows how difficult it is to reverse some of the effects of naturally occurring weather events, and is expected to be made even more difficult by human activities. It is said that it has become.

“The continued retreat of ice streams such as Thwaites Glacier and Pine Island Glacier since then indicates that the glaciers were unable to recover after the exceptionally large El Niño event of the 1940s,” says Science. they wrote.

“This may reflect the increasing dominance of anthropogenic forcings since then, including local atmospheric and oceanic circulation changes as well as large-scale This suggests that scale changes were involved.”