Deep in the remotest reaches of West Antarctica, a frozen giant the size of Britain is crumbling — and scientists are running out of time to figure out what happens next.
Thwaites Glacier, already responsible for 4% of all global sea-level rise, is at the center of an urgent international research effort to determine whether its catastrophic collapse is inevitable — and if so, when.
The glacier’s eastern ice shelf, a floating extension that has long helped brace the main ice mass against warm ocean water, could break away at any moment.
The loss of that ice shelf would remove a critical buttress, potentially accelerating the glacier’s retreat and setting off a chain reaction with global consequences. Scientists warn that if Thwaites collapses entirely, it could trigger a wider collapse of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, driving average global sea levels up by more than 3 meters — a transformation that would redraw coastlines around the planet.
“The loss of Antarctica’s doomsday glacier would transform our planet,” reads the description of a new feature in New Scientist. “Now scientists are revealing the secrets of this remotest of places, and asking the question: is its demise inevitable?”
Thwaites, which spans about 80 miles across, is the widest glacier on Earth. It sits in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica, a region that has long concerned glaciologists because much of its ice rests on bedrock below sea level — making it inherently vulnerable to warm ocean currents eating away at its underbelly.
The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, a joint U.S.-U.K. research program comprising nine projects, has been leading the charge to understand whether the glacier’s collapse could begin in the next few decades or stretch over centuries. The nearest permanently occupied research station to Thwaites is more than 1,000 miles away, underscoring the logistical hurdles scientists face in studying one of the planet’s most inaccessible places.
In January, a team of researchers from the U.K. and South Korea reached the least-understood part of the glacier to drill through the ice and directly observe how warm ocean water is melting it from below. The glacier is thousands of meters thick in places, and if it were to collapse, global sea levels would rise by at least 65 centimeters from Thwaites alone.
But the bigger fear is the domino effect. Thwaites acts as a cork holding back the vast West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which contains enough ice to raise sea levels by nearly 17 feet — more than 5 meters. If that cork pops, the consequences would be felt in every coastal city on Earth.
Recent research has revealed that the Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf — the glacier’s last floating extension into the ocean — is destabilizing not primarily from melting below, as previously thought, but from rapidly widening cracks. That finding has shifted scientists’ understanding of how the glacier might fail, suggesting that mechanical failure could outpace thermal melting.
Other studies have probed extreme scenarios to test the glacier’s resilience. In one simulation, researchers removed all ocean melting entirely over a 150-year period and still found that Thwaites and neighboring Pine Island Glacier continued to lose ice. In another modeling exercise, when Thwaites collapsed first, it created enough flux to sustain an ice shelf that temporarily buffered some of the destabilizing effects — though ultimately, the collapse remained underway.
The timeline remains deeply uncertain. Some models suggest Thwaites could lose its grip on an underwater seamount within the next decade, a development that could set off a rapid retreat. Other projections indicate that a full collapse is unlikely within the next few decades but that retreat will accelerate through the 21st and 22nd centuries. Still, researchers caution that a general collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet over that timeframe “cannot be ruled out.”
One study published in January found that if ocean temperatures warm by more than 2 degrees Celsius above current levels, Thwaites could collapse before 2100. With present-day ocean thermal forcing held constant over multiple centuries, models suggest large parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could deglaciate, raising global mean sea level by at least a meter.
The stakes could hardly be higher. More than 3 meters of sea-level rise would inundate low-lying coastal regions from Miami to Mumbai, displace tens of millions of people and reshape the global map. For the scientists racing to understand Thwaites, the question is no longer whether the glacier is changing — it’s how fast, and whether anything can stop it.
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