Slap yourself and pay attention: The Doomsday Glacier is a global risk

Editor’s note: Marshall Brain – futurist, inventor, NCSU professor, writer and creator of “How Stuff Works” is a contributor to WRAL TechWire, taking a serious as well as entertaining world of possibilities for the world and the human race. He’s also author of “The Doomsday Book.”

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RALEIGH – Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars this week. Everyone at work was talking about it. The mainstream media along with people on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc. wrote tens of thousands of articles and opinions about it.

Last week, two extraordinary things happened in Antarctica that everyone should be talking about. These two things act as a dark premonition of terrible events coming in humanity’s future:

  1. There was an extreme heating event in Antarctica, where temperatures in some areas were 70 degrees F above the norm for this time of year.
  2. The Conger ice shelf collapsed, releasing 460 square miles of ice.

Not a single person mentioned it to me. Most people are unaware. Antarctica is 7,000 miles away – why should anyone in the United States care? Because this is the first ice shelf to collapse. With the rise of these heating events, we will likely see other ice shelves collapsing in the near future.

Photo courtesy of Marshall Brain

Unfortunately, there is one particular ice shelf attached to an enormous “doomsday” glacier. If this ice shelf breaks up, it has a good chance of ultimately raising sea levels by 10 feet. Think about your favorite beach. Now imagine what it will look like after sea levels rise 10 feet. If that happens it will unleash the destruction of a number of major coastal cities like Miami, Boston and Shanghai. And your favorite beach will be gone.

What we are talking about is the collapse of the big glaciers in Western Antarctica. Please take a moment to open a map of Antarctica (e.g. see the map in this article: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51097309). Western Antarctica is the left side, with a ridge of mountains toward the middle of Antarctica separating east from west. The problem with the western side of Antarctica is that it contains gigantic now-fragile glaciers.

The first glacier we are concerned about is the Thwaites glacier. Many scientists literally call it the Doomsday Glacier. It has four problems:

  1. As glaciers go, Thwaites glacier is enormous at about 74,000 square miles. To put that in perspective, it is a bit bigger than Florida. It is more than a mile thick on average. So we are looking at roughly 115,000 cubic miles of ice, some of it above the waterline and some below.
  2. In round numbers, a cubic mile of ice contains a trillion gallons of water. 100 cubic miles of ice above the waterline will raise sea levels by a millimeter. One millimeter doesn’t sound like much until you factor in the enormity of the glacier. Just this one glacier could raise sea levels by a foot or more when it collapses.
  3. Glaciers move. Thwaites moves slowly right now toward the ocean. The rate that the whole glacier moves is speeding up however, and the rate that it is melting has been accelerating too. Hotter planet = faster glaciers and faster melting.
  4. Thwaites glacier is supporting other glaciers next to it. For example, Pine Island glacier is similar in size to Thwaites glacier, and once Thwaites has collapsed, Pine Island glacier will collapse. Therefore, we don’t want Thwaites glacier to collapse, because the collapse of several other big glaciers becomes imminent.
Pixabay image of Antarctica

The Thwaites glacier ice sheet is like the first domino in a chain. Once this first domino falls, the rest of the dominos start falling too. The eventual result could be a near-total collapse of the Western Antarctica ice sheet. In this scenario, sea levels rise about 10 feet (3,000 millimeters). Although we have no 100% certain way to predict what will happen, because nothing like this has ever happened in human history, scientists do have various models they can use to try to predict what will happen with this glacier. In some of these models, a combination of relatively warmer water getting under the glacier plus a melting and collapsing ice shelf causes the glacier’s speed to accelerate even more, leading to the relatively rapid collapse of Thwaites glacier.

When sea levels rise that much, two things happen. First, many coastal cities get flooded out of existence. Miami is an example. The whole city gets submerged, and it is lost. Second, it makes storm surges much worse. For example, the edges of Manhattan are lost when sea level rises 10 feet, but not the whole city. The problem comes when a big storm (hurricane, nor’easter, etc.) hits the city and sends storm surge flooding toward the city core.

Solutions

The biggest question is: What should humanity be doing right now to try to prevent this future from happening? And then, depending on what actions humanity takes, what is the actual timing of events? Does this doomsday scenario unfold over a few decades, or does it take a hundred years?

If humanity were a rational species, then we would be trying to solve the Thwaites glacier problem with the maximum effort possible. If sea levels rise by 10 feet in a relatively short time, then:

  1. Hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from flooding coastal cities.
  2. Several dozen major coastal cities along with hundreds of smaller towns and settlements will be destroyed.
  3. Trillions of dollars of infrastructure will be lost.
  4. All of the existing beaches around the world will disappear.

The only good news is this: some of the solutions to the Thwaites problem, if implemented, will benefit other parts of the planet by preventing or slowing down other climate change effects.

Obvious steps that humanity should take to address the Thwaites glacier problem include:

  1. Humanity needs to stop burning fossil fuels immediately. When we do that, we will move a big step forward in solving other climate change problems.
  2. Humanity needs to be extracting CO2 back out of the atmosphere at a global scale.
  3. Humanity needs to not just stop, but also reverse the destruction of rain forests so that they can recover. If the rain forests collapse, they will release an enormous amount of new CO2 into the atmosphere, making matters much worse.
  4. Humanity needs to design and implement geoengineering projects that would slow the collapse of Thwaites glacier.

Will humanity as a whole be able to do anything about climate change and take these four steps? Can our species actually come together and make global decisions that would benefit the entire planet? We will get to watch in real time and see how these events unfold. If people would get as animated about climate change as they do about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock, we might have a chance of solving climate change.

Sources:

More from Marshall Brain:

A doomsday scenario is unfolding in Ukraine – and we’re watching via live stream

Is humanity headed for a global food crisis? ‘Doomsday Book’ author warns …

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