The field camp on Thwaites glacier where the team were based for drilling. Credit: Greg Balco Collaboration found that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet had been thinner in the past and had regrown, suggesting that glacial retreat could be reversed. The study used rock samples to show that ice near Thwaites Glacier was at least 35 meters thinner in the last 5000 years and took a minimum of 3000 years to reach its current size.
Sea level rise is already putting millions of people in low-lying coastal communities around the world at risk from flooding. The contribution from melting Antarctic ice is currently the greatest source of uncertainty in predictions of how much and how quickly the sea level will rise in the coming decades and centuries. Together with its immediate neighbor, Thwaites Glacier currently dominates the Antarctic contribution to sea level rise.
Using drills specially designed to cut through both ice and the underlying rock, the team recovered rock samples from deep beneath the ice sheet next to Thwaites Glacier. They then measured, in those rock samples, specific atoms that are made when rocks are exposed at the surface of the Earth to radiation coming from outer space. If ice covers those rocks, these particular atoms are no longer made.
The team discovered that the rocks they collected were not always covered by ice. Their measurements showed that, during the past 5000 years, ice near Thwaites Glacier was at least 35 meters thinner than it is now. Furthermore, their models demonstrated that its growth since then – making the ice sheet the size it is today – took at least 3000 years.
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