((PKG)) ANTARCTICA’S THWAITES “DOOMSDAY” GLACIER
((TRT: 09:08))
((Reporter/Camera: Aaron Fedor))
((Producer: Kathleen McLaughlin))
((Editor: Kyle Dubiel))
((Map: State College, Pennsylvania, Antarctica))
((Main characters: 0 female; 2 male))
((Sub characters: 1 female; 3 male))
((Blurb: A glaciologist explains the danger of global warming’s effect on Thwaites Glacier, with the increased melting from the glacier causing sea level rise across the globe.))
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((Sridhar Anandakrishnan
Glaciologist, Professor, Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences))
Antarctica is like no other place on the planet. It is unique. It’s just this vast expanse of snow and ice and mountains and glaciers and ocean. It's otherworldly. It's so separated from the rest of the world, and yet it's so important to the rest of the world. And I just love that combination of things, of that pristine isolation and remoteness attached to its importance in the global system. It's the landmass and ice mass that surrounds the South Pole. It's as large as basically as large as North America. And it is not the property or territory of any country. About 60 years ago, a lot of nations came together and said,
((Courtesy: Josh Rowe))
((Sridhar Anandakrishnan
Glaciologist, Professor, Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences))
“Hey, let's keep Antarctica as a place for scientific research, as a place without a military on it, without any disputes between nations.”
And that's worked remarkably well. It's something called the Antarctic Treaty. But I think it's really one of the most remarkable examples of international cooperation, where people are coming together to study the planet, to share their knowledge, and to be good neighbors. We all help each other down there.
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((Sridhar Anandakrishnan
Glaciologist, Professor, Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences))
What I do is I study the ice. So, it is at the South Pole. It's cold year-round, and so the continent is just covered by this huge layer of ice glaciers, what we call an ice sheet, something that just covers the entire continent. I'm a glaciologist. I study glaciers. That's my area of specialization.
((Courtesy: Josh Rowe))
((Sridhar Anandakrishnan
Glaciologist, Professor, Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences))
And so the reason I go to Antarctica is to find out how big the glacier is, the ice sheet, the thing that covers the entire continent, how thick it is, what its properties are, how fast the ice is flowing. What happens in Antarctica doesn't stay in Antarctica. It spreads all around the globe.
((NATS))
((Sridhar Anandakrishnan
Glaciologist, Professor, Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences))
Over the next 50 to a hundred years, Antarctica is going to raise sea level around the globe, which is going to affect a lot of people in coastal areas. The two places that water really lives on this globe is the oceans and Antarctica. The form of water in Antarctica is ice. So what happens is, every year, water is transferred from the ocean to Antarctica in the form of snowfall, evaporation from the ocean, and snowfall in Antarctica. And then, Antarctica returns water to the ocean when these glaciers break up and melt and icebergs form. If that cycle is such that Antarctica is dumping more and more and more ice and water into the oceans, then the oceans start to rise. And they don't just rise right around Antarctica, they rise around the globe.
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((Sridhar Anandakrishnan
Glaciologist, Professor, Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences))
So, the Thwaites Glacier is a large, one of the largest glaciers in Antarctica. When we fly out there, and the airplane lands in the middle of Thwaites Glacier, and then the airplane takes off, when you're standing there and you look all around 360 degrees, you don't see anything. It’s…there's no trees, there's no houses, there's no roads, there's no cities, and the land has some undulations to it. There's some mountains in the distance, but there's no human footprint, and all you see is just a big snow field that stretches out to infinity in all directions. And if the time of year is correct, there might not be a human being for 500 miles or a thousand miles in any direction. So you are quite isolated out there.
((Courtesy: Josh Rowe))
((Sridhar Anandakrishnan
Glaciologist, Professor, Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences))
We're very particularly interested in it because a lot of our models and some of our observations seem to show that it's melting faster and faster and it's returning water faster and faster.
And some of the models show that it has the possibility of adding something like two feet of about 60 centimeters, two feet of global sea level rise. And the question we have is, is that going to happen over 50 years or 500 years?
((Sridhar Anandakrishnan
Glaciologist and geophysicist, Professor, Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences))
And you have to remember when I say two feet of sea level rise, that's around the globe, and that's an enormous amount of water out of this one glacier in Antarctica, and there's hundreds of glaciers in Antarctica.
((Courtesy: Josh Rowe))
((Sridhar Anandakrishnan
Glaciologist and geophysicist, Professor, Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences))
So understanding Thwaites will give us a handle on how worried we should be about the potential for sea level rise in the next 50 years.
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((Byron Parizek
Professor, Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences))
Like most models, we can sit there and say, “Well, there are changes in the system and they might have slow, predictable changes in the ice.” On the flip side, you can also have very rapid changes.
((Byron Parizek
Professor, Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences))
The reason why we talk about Thwaites as a doomsday glacier is because of its geometry, right? So, it's sitting on a bed. It's thicker and thicker as you move inland. And so dynamically, what that implies is that the thicker you are at the grounding line where you go from grounded ice to floating ice, the faster the outflux is. And so, if you move that grounding line back, you're going to end up flushing ice out more readily to the ocean and changing sea level rapidly.
((NATS))
((Courtesy: Sridhar Anandakrishnan))
((Speaker 1))
You got it?
((Speaker 2))
Got it.
((Speaker 3))
Got it.
((Speaker 2))
Okay.
((Speaker 1))
That’s a load.
((Speaker 3))
Sweet.
((Speaker 2))
That's everything?
((Sridhar Anandakrishnan
Glaciologist and geophysicist, Professor, Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences))
The reason why the term ‘Doomsday Glacier’ is not one that I really like is that it implies there's nothing to be done. I think that is one of the most insidious and dangerous attitudes that we can have that we are doomed, that there is no turning back, that there's nothing to be done. There are an enormous number of things that we can do, both as a society, and to a lesser extent as individuals. I think the right way to do this is to approach this as a community, as a government, as a nation, and then the many nations around the globe.
The human cause of climate change is from CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. We burn gasoline in our cars. We burn diesel in our power plants, all of that. The waste product from that is carbon dioxide. We produce about a pound of carbon dioxide for every mile that we drive down the road.
((Sridhar Anandakrishnan
Glaciologist and geophysicist, Professor, Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences))
And I think that we are at a moment when the transition from carbon dioxide-based fossil fuel power systems to renewables like solar panels and wind, is not just doable. It's actually the right thing to do. It's cheaper to put up solar panels and wind to produce energy than it is to build a new power plant. It's cleaner. It's going to make more jobs for people. It's going to really transform our society. But we have to have the will and the energy and the vision to go down that road.
((Courtesy: Sridhar Anandakrishnan))
((Sridhar Anandakrishnan
Glaciologist and geophysicist, Professor, Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences))
We can and we must work together as a society to undo, to unwind the effects that we have had on this globe that is causing the warming. And I think we can do that. I think we have all the resources in place. The technology is there. The money is to be made. People can make money off of this transition. All we need is the will.
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