From the «how long can you tread water haw haw haw» department:
Feed: Slashdot
Title: Antarctica's 'Doomsday Glacier' Began Melting In Mid-20th Century, Study
Finds
Author: BeauHD
Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2024 04:00:00 -0500
Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/02/28/0527235/antarcticas-doomsday-glacier-began-melting-in-mid-20th-century-study-finds?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

According to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, West Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier began rapidly receding
in the 1940s -- much earlier than scientists had previous thought. The Hill
notes that it's often referred to as the "doomsday glacier" due to the
potentially catastrophic consequences of its hypothetical collapse. From the
report: While scientists had already observed the glacier's accelerated retreat
by the 1970s, they did not know when it began. Coupled with earlier research
about Thwaites's neighboring Pine Island Glacier, the study also provides new,
potentially alarming, insight into the cause of the glacier's melting.
Scientists tried to reconstruct the glacier's history using analysis of the
marine sedimentary record, and they found the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers
both lost contact with the seafloor highs in the 1940s -- at around the same
time. These significant changes happened against the backdrop of a massive El
Nino weather phenomenon, the scientists found, showing the glaciers "were
responding to the same driver(s)." "The synchronous ice retreat of these two
major ice streams suggests that, rather than being driven by internal dynamics
unique to each glacier, retreat in the Amundsen Sea drainage sector results from
external oceanographic and atmospheric drivers, which recent modeling studies
show are modulated by climate variability," the study read. The scientists note
that the glaciers' continued retreat shows how difficult it can be to reverse
some of the consequences of naturally occurring weather events -- which they say
is made even more difficult by human activity. "That ice streams such as
Thwaites Glacier and Pine Island Glacier have continued to retreat since then
indicates that they were unable to recover after the exceptionally large El Nino
event of the 1940s," the scientists wrote. "This may reflect the increasing
dominance of anthropogenic forcing since that time but implies that this
involved large-scale, in additional to local, atmospheric and ocean circulation
changes."

[image 2][2] [image 4][4]

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