The study of ice sheets is usually justified through the shear proportion of the water cycle that is locked up inside them: Antarctica holds about 60% of the world's fresh water, while Greenland holds 10%. There is clear geologic evidence that number and size of ice sheets varied throughout Earth's History. This means sea level changes. The current amount of ice locked up in Greenland and Antarctica can raise global average sea levels by about 70 meters. With nearly 1 billion people in the risk area, and the climate warming faster than anywhere in the observational record, this begs the question: 'how much and how fast?'.
While Greenland is trending to contribute a sizeable amount to sea level rise in the coming centuries, the largest uncertainties in the predictions come from the inherently unstable West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). At the heart of WAIS lies the rapidly accelerating Thwaites Glacier - often called a canary in a coal mine, or the doomsday glacier in popular media. In this talk I will introduce you to Thwaites and why it is so critical. I will outline the work of 8 vast interdisciplinary science teams that studied Thwaites since 2017 as part of joint US-UK led International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration and the findings we discovered.
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