University of Michigan Study Finds ‘Doomsday Glacier’ May Not Collapse After All
“Scientists have studied Thwaites’s melting process for decades, sometimes giving pessimistic predictions for its future.”
Members of the climate change religion are not going to be happy about this news.
The College Fix reports:
‘Doomsday Glacier’ may not catastrophically collapse after all, UMich study finds
The Antarctic “Doomsday Glacier” is not in as much danger of collapse as climate scientists originally believed.
The Thwaites Glacier, an ice shelf in Western Antarctica the size of Florida, may thin out gradually as it melts, rather than fracturing and causing a catastrophic chain reaction, according to a study led by University of Michigan scientists.
“Our study shows that the scenario of really catastrophic ice sheet disintegration–icebergs toppling off the ice sheet like dominos–is less likely to be sustained. At least in the short term,” Michigan climate professor Jeremy Bassis, who led the study, told The College Fix in an email.
Scientists have studied Thwaites’s melting process for decades, sometimes giving pessimistic predictions for its future. In April, an international team of scientists published a study that suggested the glacier was close to losing its anchor points to the rest of the continent. It’s been dubbed the “Doomsday Glacier” in news reports.
Bassis and his team found, however, that even “if vulnerable locations like Thwaites Glacier start to collapse, small resistive forces from sea-ice and calved debris can slow down or arrest retreat, reducing the potential for sustained ice sheet collapse.”
“But the less catastrophic scenario could still involve a larger rate of sea level rise than what most models predict,” Bassis qualified in his email to The Fix.
The central concern with predictions of glacial demise is that it can lead to a rise in sea levels, potentially causing coastlines to recede.
“When talking about sea level rise, we have high confidence that sea level is going to continue to rise. The question that we are facing is whether our models of future sea level rise 50-100 years (or more) into the future significantly underestimate sea level rise,” Bassis told The College Fix.
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Comments
The Thwaites Glacier is quantum-entangled with the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: predicting about 10 minutes to the end of the world since 1947, yet never actually getting there, nor will it.