Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier is tipping towards total collapse – and could lose its entire ice shelf this year, scientists have warned.
The Thwaites Glacier is one of the largest glaciers in the world, covering an area equal to that of Great Britain.
If it were to collapse completely, it has the potential to raise sea levels by a staggering 26 inches (65 centimetres) and wreak havoc on the world’s coastal regions.
Now, researchers say that the glacier’s floating ‘buttress’ of ice could crumble away within months.
The Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf (TEIS) is a wall of ice attached to the glacier’s eastern flank, holding back the flow of ice into the sea.
This supporting barrier is over 1,150 feet (350 metres) thick and covers 580 square miles (1,500 square kilometres) – about the area of Greater London.
However, the Antarctic’s warming oceans are now thinning this frozen bulwark at an alarming rate.
Dr Robert Larter, marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey, warns that the shelf’s breakup is ‘very likely to happen sometime this year’.
Scientists say that the Doomsday Glacier’s eastern ice shelf (pictured) is likely to collapse this year as it thins due to warming waters
While scientists don’t think the collapse of the entire Thwaites Glacier is imminent, multiple studies now suggest that the TEIS is on the brink of failure.
Speaking in an interview with Live Science, Dr Larter says: ‘The last bit of ice shelf in front of the glacier is poised to disintegrate.
‘We don’t know quite how this ice shelf is going to break up, but it’s definitely going to go.’
The main reason for this dramatic transformation is that the ice shelf is thinning from below as warm water flows beneath the ice.
A recent expedition to drill through the ice sheet found that the waters flowing beneath Thwaites are warming, driving the thinning process and weakening its structure.
Satellite images show that new fault lines are opening up in the ice shelf at an increasing rate.
Critically, these fissures are now forming along the ‘grounding line’, the point where the floating ice shelf meets the bedrock below.
This suggests that the physics deep within the ice has changed, and that the shelf is now tearing itself apart as ice is rammed into this ‘pinning point’.
Researchers have found that the Thwaite Glacier’s ice shelves are melting from beneath, weakening the buttresses that hold back the flowing glaciers behind
‘It’s tearing away from the glacier at the moment, and its internal structure is getting more and more fragile,’ Dr Larter said.
‘You can see the fractures and rifts growing in sequences of satellite images.’
Between January 2020 and January 2026, researchers found that the TEIS’ flow rate had tripled to just over 2,000 metres per year.
In the five months at the start of this year, the ice shelf has accelerated even more.
The situation is now so dire that Dr Larter told New Scientist that the British Antarctic Survey has already prepared an ‘obituary’ press release for the shelf.
If the TEIS collapses this year as Dr Larter predicts, many scientists are concerned that it could accelerate the degradation of the entire Doomsday Glacier.
Without the ice sheet providing a buttressing back–force, some predict that the glacier will accelerate its slide into the sea.
Eventually, that could lead to the entire glacier collapsing on a timescale that ranges from decades to centuries, depending on the model used.
The Thwaites Glacier already contributes four per cent of all global sea level increases. If the ice shelves collapse, this could accelerate its descent into the sea and raise sea levels even further
However, whether it is in decades or in centuries, Dr Larter says the Thwaites Glacier will definitely collapse.
He says: ‘Even if we get to net zero [emissions] at 2050, this glacier is going to go. It is going to add 65 centimetres [26 inches] to sea level rise, which is a large commitment and will be something that’s difficult to deal with in many places around the world.’
However, not all scientists are so convinced that the imminent collapse of the eastern ice shelf really does spell disaster for Thwaites.
Dr Daniel Goldberg, an ice sheet expert from the University of Edinburgh, says he agrees with Dr Larter that the TEIS is on the verge of collapse this year.
‘It’s really heavily crevassed, on certain satellite photos it just looks like a bunch of icebergs that just happen to be floating together,’ Dr Goldberg told the Daily Mail.
However, he says that the loss of the Thwaites ice shelves isn’t likely to trigger the dramatic acceleration predicted by some scientists.
While there would be some big changes in the area around the TEIS, Dr Goldberg says that the impact on the Thwaites Glacier as a whole has been ‘a little overstated’.
He says: ‘We did experiments using ice sheet models, and we examined what the impact would be of removing all the current floating ice from Thwaites.
Previous studies suggest that the Thwaites Glacier could lose 200 megatonnes of ice every year by 2067. Pictured: Maps showing models of ice loss speed on the Thwaites Glacier
‘We saw very little difference in the evolution of Thwaites between keeping the ice shelf intact and removing it entirely.’
These models suggest that the force being applied back up the glacier from the pinning point in the Eastern ice shelf isn’t as great as previously thought.
‘I don’t believe it’s doing very much buttressing, so the removal of ice at this moment might not have as much of an impact as people are predicting,’ Dr Goldberg says.
However, Dr Goldberg cautions that the Thwaites Glacier is one of the hardest glaciers to accurately model.
This means it is ‘hard to say’ if or when the Doomsday Glacier may eventually collapse in the future.
THE RETREAT OF THE THWAITES GLACIER
The Thwaites glacier is slightly smaller than the total size of the UK, approximately the same size as the state of Washington, and is located in the Amundsen Sea.
It is up to 4,000 metres (13,100 feet thick) and is considered a key in making projections of global sea level rise.
The glacier is retreating in the face of the warming ocean and is thought to be unstable because its interior lies more than two kilometres (1.2 miles) below sea level while, at the coast, the bottom of the glacier is quite shallow.
The Thwaites glacier is the size of Florida and is located in the Amundsen Sea. It is up to 4,000 meters thick and is considered a key in making projections of global sea level rise
The Thwaites glacier has experienced significant flow acceleration since the 1970s.
From 1992 to 2011, the centre of the Thwaites grounding line retreated by nearly 14 kilometres (nine miles).
Annual ice discharge from this region as a whole has increased 77 percent since 1973.
Because its interior connects to the vast portion of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that lies deeply below sea level, the glacier is considered a gateway to the majority of West Antarctica’s potential sea level contribution.
The collapse of the Thwaites Glacier would cause an increase of global sea level of between one and two metres (three and six feet), with the potential for more than twice that from the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
