Enormous Florida-Sized Glacier In Antarctica Can Trigger A Devastating Effect

In western Antarctica, there’s a glacier that has the size of Florida, and it seems that it’s losing ice at a faster rate than ever before.

According to Insider.com, some sections of the Thwaites Glacier “are retreating by up to 2,625 feet per year, contributing to 4% of sea-level rise worldwide.”

The worst thing is that this ice loss is part of a broader trend: “The entire Antarctic ice sheet is melting nearly six times as fast as it did 40 years ago.”

It’s been reported that back in the ’80s, Antarctica had lost 40 billion tons of ice on a yearly basis.

But on the other hand, during the last decade, that number jumped to an average of 252 billion tons per year.

The Thwaites Glacier becomes a time bomb

Now, researchers have been working on a new study which reports that over the past six years, the rate at which the five Antarctic glaciers have melted has doubled.

This reportedly makes that Thwaites Glacier a melting time bomb.

According to the scientists’ notes which have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the glacier poses the most considerable risk to future sea-level rise.

The glacier is heading towards an irreversible melting point 

The conclusion was that the glacier is racing towards an irreversible melting point.

“After reaching the tipping point, Thwaites Glacier could lose all of its ice in 150 years,” Hélène Seroussi, an author of the study and a NASA scientist, stated.

She continued and said, “That would make for a sea-level rise of about half a meter (1.64 feet).”

This glacier is a vast mass of ice that has been born from the snow that’s been compressed over time.

This is also part of the Antarctic sheet of ice which is a large continental glacier that is currently covering at least 20k square miles of land. Just to make things clearer, this is the size of US and Mexico combined.