Antarctica’s ‘doomsday glacier’ began melting in mid-20th century: study | Top Vip News

West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier, often referred to as the “doomsday glacier” because of the potentially catastrophic consequences of its hypothetical collapse, began rapidly receding at an earlier date than scientists had previously known, according to a study published on Monday.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study used New satellite technology to end the rapid melting of the glacier probably began in the 1940s.

While scientists had already observed the glacier’s accelerated retreat in the 1970s, they didn’t know when it started.

Along with previous research on Thwaites’ neighboring Pine Island glacier, the study also provides new, potentially alarming, information about the cause of the glacier’s melting.

Scientists attempted to reconstruct the history of the glacier by analyzing the marine sedimentary record and discovered that the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers lost contact with seafloor heights in the 1940s, around the same time.

These significant changes occurred in the context of a massive El Niño climate phenomenon, the scientists found, showing that the glaciers “were responding to the same drivers.”

“The synchronous ice retreat of these two major ice streams suggests that, rather than being driven by internal dynamics unique to each glacier, the retreat in the Amundsen Sea drainage sector is the result of external oceanographic and atmospheric factors.” , which recent modeling studies show are modulated by climate variability,” the study reads.

Scientists say the continued retreat of glaciers shows how difficult it can be to reverse some of the consequences of natural weather events, which they say are made even more difficult by human activity.

“The fact that ice streams such as Thwaites Glacier and Pine Island Glacier have continued to retreat since then indicates that they were unable to recover after the exceptionally large El Niño event of the 1940s,” the scientists wrote.

“This may reflect the increasing dominance of anthropogenic forcing since then, but implies that this involved large-scale changes in addition to local, atmospheric and ocean circulation changes.”