Environment does not go well with the glaciers in Antarctica, that is conscience. The last 25 years, it lost continent no less than three trillion tons of ice, at an alarming speed. Scientists from NASA have now a huge cavity discovered under the Thwaites glacier, “the most dangerous in the world”. There is space for up to 14 billion tonnes of ice. But that is no longer there.
The giant emptiness below the Thwaites glacier is almost 300 feet tall and measure 10 4 km. With a surface area of about 40 km2, it is the cavity larger than the city of Ostend and covers two-thirds of the whole of Manhattan. The opening is so large, that a clear chunk of the approximately 252 billion tonnes of ice that is Antarctica each year kwijtspeelt. According to a new study published in Science Advances would ever 14 billion tons of ice have fit, but only in the last three years, the largest portion of that volume is lost.
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Pietro Milillo, lead author of the article, says that such a cavity under a glacier can play a substantial role in the melting of the ice. “If there is more heat and water under the glacier to get to melt faster.” Not least because of the Thwaites glacier currently has a share of about 4 percent in the rise of the global sea level. If the whole glacier as large as the state of Florida melt away, sea levels will rise by an estimated 65 inches.
