Over 100 researchers and support staff working on the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) from across the US and UK, together with other international partners, met at British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge in September 2024 to discuss their observations and results so far.
It is the latest in-person gathering of the ITGC science community who are studying Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica and trying to answer the questions of ‘how much and how fast?’ the glacier will contribute to global sea-level rise in the future.
As part of the meeting, sessions looked at the results from over six years of study, with some project teams sharing how the glacier’s interactions with the ocean, ice bed character and responses to changing conditions are different to what they had first assumed. By the end of the week, the community shared their latest model predictions: that the melting of Thwaites will accelerate through the 21st and 22nd centuries, leading to the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in the 23rd century. Crucially, they also shared that emissions levels make an actual difference to the timeline of melting.
Thwaites Glacier spans an area equal to the island of Great Britain or the US state of Florida, and in places is over 3000 m (over 10,000 feet) thick. The volume of ice flowing into the sea from Thwaites and its neighbouring glaciers has more than doubled from the 1990s to the 2010s, and the wider region, called the Amundsen Sea Embayment, accounts for 8% of the current rate of global sea level rise of 4.5 mm per year.
The mission of the ITGC is to gain an understanding of the critical physical processes controlling the glacier in the present climate and over the last few thousand years, and to build a more reliable prediction of how the glacier will change in the future and why.
ITGC glaciologists Dr Sridhar Anandakrishnan and Dr Megan Sharp from Penn State University and oceanographer Dr Pete Davis from British Antarctic Survey were interviewed on their observations and reflections about Thwaites Glacier in the ‘Beyond the Ice’ podcast. Listen to the podcast here.
