‘Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier is known as the “Doomsday glacier,” due to the serious risk it poses during its melting process. It has dumped billions of tons of ice into the sea, and its demise could lead to irreversible changes throughout the planet.
The glacier, which equals the size of Florida or Great Britain, already accounts for about 4% of annual global sea level rise, loses roughly 50 billion tons of ice each year, and is becoming highly vulnerable to the climate crisis. The fall of the ice shelf could bring the impending collapse of Antarctica’s critical glacier.
“We can’t really do anything to stop this from happening,” besides slowing it down, Peter Davis, oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey said. “The way that we’ve gone with our carbon emissions so far has caused these changes to occur — and essentially, we’re taking the consequences of what we’ve been emitting over the last couple of decades, if not longer.”’
— written by Rachel Ramirez, CNN