Harry is a U.K.-based staff writer at Live Science. He studied Marine Biology at the University of Exeter (Penryn campus) and after graduating started his own blog site 'Marine Madness,' which he continues to run with other ocean enthusiasts. He is also interested in evolution, climate change, robots, space exploration, environmental conservation and anything that's been fossilized. When not at work he can be found watching sci-fi films, playing old Pokemon games or running (probably slower than he'd like).
Underwater robots that peered under Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier, nicknamed the"Doomsday Glacier," saw that its doom may come sooner than expected with an extreme spike in ice loss. A detailed map of the seafloor surrounding the icy behemoth has revealed that the glacier underwent periods of rapid retreat within the last few centuries, which could be triggered again through melt driven by climate change.
In the new study, an international team of researchers used an underwater robot to map out one of Thwaites' past grounding points: a protruding seafloor ridge known as"the bump," which is around 2,133 feet below the surface. The resulting map revealed that at some point during the last two centuries, when the bump was propping up Thwaites Glacier, the glacier's ice mass retreated more than twice as fast as it does now.
The resulting map showed that the bump is covered with around 160 parallel grooved lines that give it a barcode-like appearance. These strange-looking grooves, which are also known as ribs, are between 0.3 and 2.3 feet deep. The spaces between the ribs range short and wide, between 5.2 and 34.4 feet apart, but they are most commonly around 23 feet apart.
Based on the spacing of the ribs, the researchers estimated that when the Thwaites glacier was anchored on the bump, the icy mass retreated at a rate of between 1.3 and 1.4 miles per year. This means that the glacier was retreating almost three times faster than it was between 2011 and 2019, when it was receding at a rate of around 0.5 miles per year, according to satellite data.
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