(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Finally, the media covers the rapid decay of Thwaites Glacier. [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-16 Fissures on the Thwaites Glacier. The national and international media finally reported yesterday on the unfolding disaster at Thwaites Glacier, located in the highly vulnerable West Antarctic. Thwaites hold two feet of sea level rise; the Amundsen Sea embayment contains four feet, and the entirety of West Antarctica is 13 feet. That is why we care; world coastlines would be devastated, including ports and the homes of millions lost forever when this shelf disintegrates. They did not cover the satellite imagery or the movement of Iceberg B22A that I have been following. Why? I have no idea. Maybe they don't know that NASA Worldview exists, follow glaciologists, the Sea Ice Forum, or read Daily Kos. Perhaps they never will. Still, they reported on the erosion by warm water that is creating channels and enlarging fissures that are freaking people out about sea level rise and our future. International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration 2023 field researchers are returning from the brutal conditions in the Amundsen Sea Embayment, where the two largest chunks of ice on earth, Pine Island Glacier and Thwaites Glacier, are rapidly deteriorating, threatening to change the course of human history. I have been following the very recent fuckery at Thwaites since December 9, 2022, when I first found tweets of climatologist Kris Van Steeben posting satellite images of the region as Iceberg B22A lifted off the sea mountain that it had been lodged on for twenty years. That iceberg had prevented the open ocean from damaging the ice tongue of the Thwaites' eastern and western ice shelves. Once the iceberg moved away from the calving front, the damage quickly followed. The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration arrived in Thwaites shortly thereafter once conditions improved for people to arrive safely. The collaboration is a relatively new organization formed only in 2018. They returned with data from a submersible robot that verified the extraordinary damage from warm ocean water. The data they bring forth is before the current unprecedented marine heatwave, which adds a new layer of peril for the soft, white underbelly of the enormous ice shelf. Chris Mooney writes in the Washington Post: The new observations emerge from what is the very definition of an extreme environment. In this part of Thwaites Glacier — perhaps its most stable region — 1,900-foot-thick ice lifts upward from the seafloor and spreads over the ocean. Where the ice first departs from the seafloor is called the “grounding line” — the three-dimensional intersection of ice, ocean and bedrock. Outward from there, the floating ice creates a dark cavity that warm seawater and some fish can enter — but that humans cannot. That’s why the observations from Icefin — which scientists pulled back up the borehole after the experiments and can be deployed again — are so unprecedented and revealing. “That’s the first time we’ve had data from that kind of environment, for Thwaites or any other glacier,” Schmidt said. They give breathtaking details of what it looks like beneath the glacier. Near the grounding line, video from the robot shows an underside of the ice that is dark and grainy because seafloor mud and sediment is frozen into it. Further downstream, the robot observed sand and pebbles falling out of the ice as it melted. Within the crevasses and terraces, the robot captured video of scalloped side walls that resemble a round coffered ceiling. “The technical achievement of getting this amazing range of data in a very difficult environment, and getting out safely, is just wonderful,” said Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State who was not directly involved in the research. The research was obtained in 2019 and 2020 from ice cores that "necessitated drilling down 2,000 feet with a hot water drill in order to deploy an ocean sensor at the base of the floating ice shelf and sent down a pen-shaped, 11-foot-long robot called Icefin." From Digital Journal: "These new ways of observing the glacier allow us to understand that it's not just how much melting is happening, but how and where it is happening that matters in these very warm parts of Antarctica. We see crevasses, and probably terraces, across warming glaciers like Thwaites. Warm water is getting into the cracks, helping wear down the glacier at its weakest points," Britney Schmidt, associate professor of astronomy and earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University said. The vessel collected data and images in an environment in which warm ocean water, in some places was more than 2 degrees Celsius above the local freezing point, and this temperature variation is weakening the glacier. The warm water entering Thwaites Glacier’s crevasses poses a serious threat, according to Britney Schmidt, a Cornell University scientist who is the lead researcher behind Icefin and deployed it with a group of 12 other researchers who encamped on the ice. “The warm water is getting into the weak spots of the glacier, and kind of making everything worse,” Schmidt said. “It shouldn’t be like that,” Schmidt continued. “That’s not what the system would look like if it wasn’t being forced by climate change.” “The crevices are basically funneling warm water faster than other parts of the glacier system,” Schmidt said. “So, the crevasses are not just weaknesses in terms of cracks in the ice, but they are becoming these giant features, and that process starts right at the grounding line.” This region of Antarctica is under heavy cloud cover, and it is impossible to see how fast the ice is crumbling on NASA's Worldview. I want to thank all of you for reading and recommending my 'Thwaites diaries" over the past two months. And, most importantly, for having my back; it means a lot to me as my head can be taken off by some commenters seething about my reporting on all the "gloom and doom." I appreciate the support more than you know. As I frequently say, you can't be called an alarmist or doomer when the climate news is alarming and full of doom. We will likely see more information from the 2022 and 2023 fieldwork in a few months. IMO the research should be released before peer review due to the seriousness of the situation. Satellite imagery will continue to provide day-to-day information until the researchers return in 2024 Stay tuned, mahalo. 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