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Warm Water Melts Weak Spots on Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’, Say Scientists

A robot nicknamed Icefin operates under the sea ice near McMurdo Station in Antarctica in 2020. (Icefin/NASA PSTAR RISE UP via AP)
A robot nicknamed Icefin operates under the sea ice near McMurdo Station in Antarctica in 2020. (Icefin/NASA PSTAR RISE UP via AP)
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Warm Water Melts Weak Spots on Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’, Say Scientists

A robot nicknamed Icefin operates under the sea ice near McMurdo Station in Antarctica in 2020. (Icefin/NASA PSTAR RISE UP via AP)
A robot nicknamed Icefin operates under the sea ice near McMurdo Station in Antarctica in 2020. (Icefin/NASA PSTAR RISE UP via AP)

Scientists studying Antarctica's vast Thwaites Glacier - nicknamed the Doomsday Glacier - say warm water is seeping into its weak spots, worsening melting caused by rising temperatures, two papers published in Nature journal showed on Wednesday.

Thwaites, which is roughly the size of Florida, represents more than half a meter (1.6 feet) of global sea level rise potential, and could destabilize neighboring glaciers that have the potential to cause a further three-meter (9.8-foot) rise.

As part of the International Thwaites Glacier collaboration - the biggest field campaign ever attempted in Antarctica - a team of 13 US and British scientists spent about six weeks on the glacier in late 2019 and early 2020.

Using an underwater robot vehicle known as Icefin, mooring data and censors, they monitored the glacier's grounding line, where ice slides off the glacier and meets the ocean for the first time.

In one of the papers, led by Cornell University-based scientist Britney Schmidt, researchers found that warmer water was making its way into crevasses and other openings known as terraces, causing sideways melt of 30 meters (98 feet) or more per year.

"Warm water is getting into the weakest parts of the glacier and making it worse," Schmidt told Reuters.

"That is the kind of thing we should all be very concerned about," she said about the findings which underscored how climate change is reaching isolated Antarctica.

The other paper's findings, which Schmidt also worked on, showed about five meters (16 feet) per year of melt near the glacier's grounding line - less than what the most aggressive thinning models previously predicted.

But she said the melting was still of grave concern.

"If we observe less melting... that doesn't change the fact that it's retreating," Schmidt said.

Scientists have previously depended on satellite images to show the behavior of the ice, making it difficult to get granular details. The papers represent the first time a team has been to the grounding line of a major glacier, providing a look right where "the action begins," Schmidt said.

The findings will help in the development of climate change models, said Paul Cutler, program director of Antarctic Sciences at the National Science Foundation. He reviewed the papers, but was not involved in the research.

"These things can now be taken on board in the models that will predict the future behavior, and that was exactly the goal of this work," he said.

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Study Says Climate Change Will Even Make Earth’s Orbit a Mess

In this satellite image provided by CSU/CIRA & NOAA taken 1:10 GMT on Feb. 25, 2025, shows three cyclones, from left, Alfred, Seru and Rae east of Australia in the South Pacific. (CSU/CIRA & NOAA via AP, File)
In this satellite image provided by CSU/CIRA & NOAA taken 1:10 GMT on Feb. 25, 2025, shows three cyclones, from left, Alfred, Seru and Rae east of Australia in the South Pacific. (CSU/CIRA & NOAA via AP, File)
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Study Says Climate Change Will Even Make Earth’s Orbit a Mess

In this satellite image provided by CSU/CIRA & NOAA taken 1:10 GMT on Feb. 25, 2025, shows three cyclones, from left, Alfred, Seru and Rae east of Australia in the South Pacific. (CSU/CIRA & NOAA via AP, File)
In this satellite image provided by CSU/CIRA & NOAA taken 1:10 GMT on Feb. 25, 2025, shows three cyclones, from left, Alfred, Seru and Rae east of Australia in the South Pacific. (CSU/CIRA & NOAA via AP, File)

Climate change is already causing all sorts of problems on Earth, but soon it will be making a mess in orbit around the planet too, a new study finds.

MIT researchers calculated that as global warming caused by burning of coal, oil, gas continues it may reduce the available space for satellites in low Earth orbit by anywhere from one-third to 82% by the end of the century, depending on how much carbon pollution is spewed. That's because space will become more littered with debris as climate change lessens nature's way of cleaning it up.

Part of the greenhouse effect that warms the air near Earth's surface also cools the upper parts of the atmosphere where space starts and satellites zip around in low orbit. That cooling also makes the upper atmosphere less dense, which reduces the drag on the millions of pieces of human-made debris and satellites.

That drag pulls space junk down to Earth, burning up on the way. But a cooler and less dense upper atmosphere means less space cleaning itself. That means that space gets more crowded, according to a study in Monday's journal Nature Sustainability.

“We rely on the atmosphere to clean up our debris. There’s no other way to remove debris,” said study lead author Will Parker, an astrodynamics researcher at MIT. “It’s trash. It’s garbage. And there are millions of pieces of it.”

Circling Earth are millions of pieces of debris about one-ninth of an inch (3 millimeters) and larger — the width of two stacked pennies — and those collide with the energy of a bullet. There are tens of thousands of plum-sized pieces of space junk that hit with the power of a crashing bus, according to The Aerospace Corporation, which monitors orbital debris. That junk includes results of old space crashes and parts of rockets with most of it too small to be tracked.

There are 11,905 satellites circling Earth — 7,356 in low orbit — according to the tracking website Orbiting Now. Satellites are critical for communications, navigation, weather forecasting and monitoring environmental and national security issues.

“There used to be this mantra that space is big. And so we can we can sort of not necessarily be good stewards of the environment because the environment is basically unlimited,” Parker said.

But a 2009 crash of two satellites created thousands of pieces of space junk. Also NASA measurements are showing measurable the reduction of drag, so scientists now realize that that “the climate change component is really important,” Parker said.

The density at 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth is decreasing by about 2% a decade and is likely to get intensify as society pumps more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, said Ingrid Cnossen, a space weather scientist at the British Antarctic Survey who was not part of the research.

Cnossen said in an email that the new study makes “perfect sense” and is why scientists have to be aware of climate change's orbital effects “so that appropriate measures can be taken to ensure its long-term sustainability.”