Some 8,000 miles from the elegantly carpeted U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., lies an eerie, dark, underwater place — a place that threatens to redraw maps all over the globe. This realm, found under a nearly 2,000-foot-thick slab of ice in Antarctica, is where one of the planet's largest glaciers, the Florida-sized Thwaites Glacier, meets the rocky ocean floor.
Antarctic scientists are fixated on this subterranean place, called Thwaites' "grounding zone." It acts like a brake, holding Thwaites back from purging unstoppable rivers of ice into the sea, which alone could raise sea levels by over two feet — but may unleash up to eight more feet of sea level rise from its glacial neighbors. "Thwaites is the one spot in Antarctica that has the potential to dump an enormous amount of water into the ocean over the next decades," said Sridhar Anandakrishnan, a professor of glaciology at Penn State University. This critical meeting of ice and rock is retreating back Read more...
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