Cracks are rapidly spreading through the ice, and that portion of the shelf will likely shatter 'into hundreds of icebergs' within just a few years, Pettit said.

But with the loss of that resistance, the flow of the eastern shelf has shifted over the past 10 years. When the tongue was more solid, it slowed the flow of the eastern ice shelf toward the ocean. Once-solid ice masses on Thwaites that formerly helped to hold the ice shelf together are also breaking down the glacier's icy 'tongue' - a part of the ice shelf that protrudes seaward - on the western side is now 'just a loose cluster of icebergs and no longer influences this eastern, more stable section of the ice shelf,' according to AGU presenter Erin Pettit, an associate professor of geophysics and glaciology at Oregon State University. And then the opposite happens when you have high tide and the water level rises - the floating section rises up.' This up-and-down movement, known as tidal pumping, pulls water farther inland and weakens even more of the glacier, Clyne explained. 'This acts kind of like a lever, and can actually pull up a section a little bit inland that can pull water in. 'When you have low tide, the floating ice shelf portion sinks down,' Clyne said at AGU. They took temperature readings and measured salinity in the ocean, confirming that waters deep under the ice were warm enough to cause significant melt.ДЄnother group of scientists found that tidal activity could interact with the ice overhead to actively pump warm water farther inland through channels that were already carved by melt, thereby accelerating Thwaites' deterioration, said presenter Lizzy Clyne, an adjunct professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Melt from belowДЄt Thwaites, scientists bored holes through the ice to peer at the ocean hundreds of meters underneath, and other researchers deployed remote-controlled diving robots to study the glacier's grounding zone. These findings, as well as the ongoing work by ITGC and other scientists in Antarctica, will inform policymakers' strategies for tracking the impacts of glacial melt on sea-level rise over the coming decades, and how that in turn will affect coastal communities around the world, according to the presenters. 'We've got a few more years to go to assemble further results and integrate them, so we have a better understanding of this glacier moving forward.' 'We're about at the midpoint of The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration,' Scambos said at the briefing. 'And it could lead to even more sea-level rise, up to 10 feet, if it draws the surrounding glaciers with it,' Scambos said in a statement, referring to the weakening effect one ice shelf collapse can have on other nearby glaciers.Д«ecause Thwaites is changing so quickly and could significantly affect global sea-level rise, more than 100 scientists in the United States and the United Kingdom are collaborating on eight research projects to observe the glacier from top to bottom results from several of those teams were presented at AGU. If Thwaites were to break up entirely and release all its water into the ocean, sea levels worldwide would rise by more than 2 feet (65 centimeters), said ITGC lead coordinator Ted Scambos, one of the presenters at AGU and a senior research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). As the glacier weakens, it then becomes more prone to surface fractures that could spread until the entire ice shelf shatters 'like a car window' - and that could happen as soon as three years from now, researchers said at AGU, held in New Orleans and online. Warming ocean water is not just melting Thwaites from below it's also loosening the glacier's grip on the submerged seamount below, making it even more unstable. Thwaites is sometimes referred to as the 'Doomsday Glacier,' as its collapse could trigger a cascade of glacial collapse in Antarctica, and the latest research from the frozen continent suggests that doomsday may be coming for the dwindling glacier even sooner than expected. Thwaites glacier in western Antarctica is the widest glacier on Earth, spanning about 80 miles (120 kilometers) and extending to a depth of about 2,600 to 3,900 feet (800 to 1,200 meters) at its grounding line - where the glacier transitions from a land-attached ice mass to a floating ice shelf in the Amundsen Sea.

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