West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier, also known as the “Doomsday Glacier,” may be melting sooner than scientists thought. New satellite data showed that warm ocean waters were impacting it more strongly than expected.

Melting glaciers affect the lives of people all over the world. For example, due to the acceleration of this process, the Earth’s rotation speed decreases. This created the need to remove a leap second from the calendar year for the first time and adjust the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) policy three years later than planned. Such changes will have a negative impact on many areas such as distributed computing and financial markets, as they require a precise and standardized time scale. The fact is that it is impossible to program the calculation of leap seconds in advance: they are entered based on existing observations of the Earth’s speed.

Thwaites Glacier has been called the “Doomsday Glacier” because its melting would likely lead to an extremely large rise in sea levels, endangering entire coastal communities. The area of ​​this glacier is 120 thousand square kilometers. If it melts completely, the level of the world’s oceans will rise by 64 centimeters. Additionally, Thwaites Glacier is the most unstable in Antarctica: The land on which it is located tilts downward, allowing ocean waters to “eat” the ice.

Researchers from the University of California at Irvine (USA), the University of Waterloo (Canada) and the company ICEYE (Finland), which produces microsatellites, found that the “doomsday glacier” may melt earlier than expected. The journal published the results of its studies Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists worked with data collected by high-resolution satellite radar from March to June 2023. It was possible to trace how the grounding line (or grounding zone, according to the terminology used by the authors of the study) of the Thwaites Glacier – the place where the ice loses contact with the land and begins to float in the sea – is changing.

It turned out that seawater entering the base of the glacier accumulated and began to move along natural channels or pools in its cavities. A pressure arises due to the rise of the ice sheet. According to the research, seawater penetrates kilometers deep into the glacier and then “comes out” again according to the 12-hour tidal cycle.

Sea water, which travels great distances in a short time, accelerates the melting of the Doomsday Glacier. When the ice melts, the fresh water is washed away and replaced by warmer sea water.

Melting sea ice does not directly contribute to sea level rise, but the process leaves coastal glaciers exposed to waves and warmer ocean waters, according to the researchers. As a result, ice becomes more vulnerable and more likely to melt and break.