The Mendenhall River is vomiting ice. Again. For the third straight August, a glacial dam has ruptured at Suicide Basin, unleashing a biblical torrent of meltwater that’s turning Juneau’s streets into tributaries.
Evacuation orders blare across Alaska’s capital as 17-foot floodwaters swallow homes, rip through riverbanks, and drag SUVs downstream like toy cars.
This isn’t climate change’s distant warning shot—it’s a live broadcast of planetary collapse, playing in real time right now while the world hits snooze.
But Juneau’s nightmare is just the preview.
Roughly 11,000 miles south, Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier—a Florida-sized monster dubbed the “Doomsday Glacier”—is staging its own disintegration.
Scientists monitoring its crumbling underbelly report ice shelves fracturing like windshield glass, while warming seawater carves Manhattan-sized cavities beneath its underbelly.
When (not if) Thwaites fully collapses, the resulting 2-foot sea level surge will be just the opening act. The real horror begins when its collapse drags the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet down with it—unleashing a 10-foot tsunami of rising oceans that’ll redraw the world’s coastlines before your grandchildren graduate high school.
Thwaites is not the only southern danger.
Pine Island Glacier (PIG) is another large ice stream, and the fastest melting glacier in Antarctica. responsible for about 13% of Antarctica’s ice loss.
Alaska’s Recurring Horror Show
Juneau’s emergency alerts read like a dystopian rerun: “Evacuate immediately. Shelter pets at (907) 789-6997. Avoid bridges. Do not approach the river.”
The culprit? A “jökulhlaup”—an Icelandic term now haunting Alaskan bureaucrats—where glacial meltwater bursts through ice dams like a firehose through tissue paper. Last year’s flood shattered records; this year’s may top it.
This week’s flood has been anticipated for months. Since 2011, the Mendenhall Glacier has caused floods each summer as Suicide Basin — a glacially locked lake — fills with meltwater and runoff, then bursts from its confines after the water overtops an icy dam.
As more ice melts amid global climate change, the flooding has grown worse. In 2023, the flood eroded the Mendenhall River’s banks, causing homes to collapse.
In 2024, the flood was the worst yet.
Yet these localized disasters pale against Thwaites’ looming tantrum.
The Doomsday Domino Effect
Thwaites isn’t just melting—it’s being chemically dismantled. Warmer currents are tunneling beneath its 120-mile-wide ice shelf, exploiting terraced seabeds like a burglar picking locks.
NASA satellites recently spotted a submerged cavity beneath the glacier large enough to hold 14 billion tons of ice—a void that appeared in just three years. When the last icy buttresses shatter, the glacier’s collapse could:
- Drown Miami, Shanghai, and Mumbai under 10 feet of water within decades
- Trigger a chain reaction destabilizing neighboring glaciers, potentially adding another 5 feet to sea levels
- Rewrite ocean currents, disrupting global weather patterns and starving marine ecosystems
While Juneau scrambles to stack sandbags, scientists scream into the void: Thwaites’ disintegration is now inevitable, but its timeline hinges on emissions cuts we’re still failing to make.
In December, scientists released new models show that Thwaites will likely continue to lose ice at a rapid rate but its retreat will not turn into a catastrophic collapse during the 21st century.
“We’re not saying the Antarctic is safe,” cautioned Dartmouth College Professor Mathieu Morlighem, the lead author of the study by the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), which has provided a more optimistic outlook. “Sea-level rise is still a pressing issue, but we’re confident that the most extreme predictions for this century are less likely.”
While the findings offer hope, they also serve as a reminder not to become complacent. Melting ice in Antarctica and Greenland continues to raise sea levels and poses long-term risks for coastal communities worldwide.
Climate change is largely a direct consequence of human industrial activities, particularly the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The burning of fossil fuels for energy, industrial processes, and deforestation are major contributors to these emissions. These greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, trap heat in the atmosphere, leading to a warming of the planet and disrupting the Earth’s climate system.
The glacier’s “underwater staircases” are melting faster than predicted, yet we’re still dumping 37 billion tons of CO2 annually into the atmosphere like arsonists fanning the flames.
Antarctica is an ice sheet that is larger than the United States of America, and it has enough ice to raise global sea levels by almost 200 feet if it all melted.
Sea level rise is a significant consequence of climate change, primarily driven by the melting of glaciers and ice sheets and the thermal expansion of water as it warms.
Climate scientists have showed that humans are responsible for virtually all global heating over the last 200 years.
Global sea levels have been rising for decades, but the rate of increase is accelerating, posing threats to coastal communities worldwide.
Global average sea level has risen 8–9 inches since 1880. In 2023, global average sea level set a new record high at 3.99 inches above 1993 levels. In 2024, global sea levels rose faster than expected, with an increase of 0.23 inches compared to the predicted 0.17 inches.
This isn’t your grandchildren’s problem. It’s yours. The rate of sea level rise has doubled over the past three decades.
When Thwaites goes, it won’t whisper—it will roar. And by then, Juneau’s floods will look like puddle splashes beside the coming deluge.
When the polar ice breaks, we’re all downstream.