Western Antarctica is one of the fastest warming areas on Earth. There is the great Thwaiters glacier, or often dubbed the 'doomsday glacier' or 'apocalypse glacier', which continues to be searched on a massive scale.
The iceberg has since the 1980s been estimated to have lost 595 billion tonnes of ice, contributing 4% to global sea level rise. Ice is melting faster in the last 3 decades, partly because of global warming.
Now it turns out that there is another cause for the melting of the ice, namely a phenomenon that scientists call an invisible force from within the Earth. Recent research published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment reveals that the Earth's crust in West Antarctica is thinner than East Antarctica.
The ratio is 17 to 25 kilometers in West Antarctica and about 40 kilometers in East Antarctica. Thus, the Thwaiters glacier receives more gheothermal heat from the Earth than the other side.
That heat then became one of the causes of the ice in the Antarctic glacier to melt. "The large amount of geothermal heat can make the bottom of the glacier no longer completely frozen," said one of the authors of this study, Karsten Gohl.
This makes the ice in the glacier easier to shift and melt. The phenomenon of melting glacier doomsday is also expected to be a wider concern because the danger can be very big in the future if it is not handled properly.
For example, if the Doomsday glacier completely collapsed into the ocean, global sea levels would rise by about 65 kilometers. If this happens, the coastal people in various countries will be seriously affected.
Not only that, the massive loss of ice in the Antarctic area can cause a chain effect so that more and more will melt. If so, the consequences could be far more dangerous. But it should be noted, that even if it happens it may still be quite far in the future.
