The 'Doomsday Glacier' is poised to lose its ice shelf this year. An Antarctic researcher explains what that means for global sea levels - Live Science

The world’s largest glacier is melting much faster and could add twice as much to global sea levels as previously expected over the next century. New research published this week by a team of glaciologists has found that the Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica is losing mass rapidly because warm seawater is pushing underneath it and melting its core. This could add 1.2 inches (30mm) to water levels even if global warming does not accelerate as predicted. Recommended Stories list of 4 itemslist 1 of 4The Nepal floods question: When the Himalayas collapse, who gets warned?list 2 of 4India to supply Nepal electricity after floods wrecked hydropower projectslist 3 of 4El Nino reaches super status: Where will it bring rain, drought and heat?list 4 of 4‘The drought has left its mark’: Slovenia’s potato lovers lament low yieldsend of listThe findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, add to a growing body of evidence that shows that the glacier, which has been receding for decades, is now losing mass even faster than scientists thought. Researchers at the University of California in the United States collaborated with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the study.

This story is an update to the Antarctic sea ice feature in our World of Change series tracking long-term change on Earth's surface through satellite imagery. Unlike the Arctic—an ocean basin surrounded by land—the Antarctic is a large continent surrounded by an ocean. Because of this geography, sea ice has more room to expand during the winter. However, that ice also stretches into warmer latitudes, leading to more melting in the summer. Antarctic sea ice usually peaks in September, around the end of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, and retreats to a minimum in February.

Antarctica is famous for being a continent buried under ice. But beneath those frozen expanses may lie evidence of mountains that once rivaled today's Himalayas, and which profoundly shaped the trajectory of life on Earth. Previous work from 2022 has suggested that enormous mountain ranges formed as the supercontinent Gondwana assembled roughly 650 to 450 million years ago. But a new study adds to the story: It finds that while those mountains have long since eroded away, their buried 'roots' and the sediments they shed may preserve clues to an enormously consequential aspect of their existence. Researchers think those mountains helped create the environmental conditions that allowed complex animal life to flourish. This big idea comes from the smallest of geological time capsules: Zircons. Zircon crystals are unusually durable, and their chemistry and uranium-lead ages can reveal when and where the rocks that produced them formed. Because more than 99.5 percent of Antarctica is covered by ice, directly sampling its geology is difficult.