A new study has found the Totten Glacier in East Antarctica to be so unstable that it could collapse and contribute to over two metres of sea level rise.
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An worldwide consortium led by The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics (UTIG), a unit at the university’s Jackson School of Geosciences, led the research and data collection for the study.
Main aim of the research was to know analyze the stability of Totten Glacier’s ice sheet.
“We confirm that collapse has happened in the past, and is likely to happen again if we pass a tipping point, which would occur if we had between three and six degrees of warming above present”, he wrote.
The researchers also studied the sub-ice geology of the region using instruments that can detect the gravity of the Earth and the strengths of its magnetic field.
Melting of first 100-kilometer wide expanse of the ice would add about 90 centimeters to worldwide sea levels.
To date, scientists have mostly anxious about the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets as unsafe drivers of sea level rise.
Scientists say that if climate change continues on the “business as usual” trajectory – without intervention – the glacier could cross this threshold sometime in the next century, leading to an irreversible melting on a massive scale and causing the glacier to retreat rapidly.
An independent research conducted by Imperial College London and institutions in Australia, US, and New Zealand, reveals that Totten Glacier is more vulnerable than before.
Totten Glacier is East Antarctica’s largest outlet of ice and a key region for understanding the large-scale and long-term vulnerabilities of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Researchers say that would cause it to withdraw up to 300 kilometres (186 miles) inland in the following centuries and release vast quantities of water, contributing up to 2.9 metres to global sea-level rise.
To date, scientists have mostly anxious about the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets as risky drivers of sea level rise.
If the melting goes beyond a 350 kilometre zone, the scientists predict that an additional zone of unstable retreat would lead to a sea level rise of more than 4 metres.
“The evidence coming together is painting a picture of East Antarctica being much more vulnerable to a warming environment than we thought”, said study co-author Martin Siegert, professor at Imperial College London. “This is something we should worry about”, he said.
The Totten Glacier isn’t Antarctica’s largest glacier, but it’s precariously perched upon a 1-mile-deep basin of snow and ice the size of California – which means it holds back more ice than any other place on the continent.
The Totten Glacier covers a huge area – it extends approximately 1100 km (683 m) into the interior and 750 km (466 m) across. It is a major portion of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, through the Budd Coast of Wilkes Land in the Australian Antarctic Territory.
The EAIS is now thought to be relatively stable despite global warming, but research shows it is losing substantial amounts of ice.
“Totten Glacier’s catchment is covered by almost two-and-a-half miles of ice, filling a California-sized sub-ice basin that reaches depths of over one mile below sea level”, Donald Blankenship, senior research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics and co-author of the paper, said in a press release.
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One more important point revealed in the study is that the glacier also melted during an earlier period of natural global warming in the past.
