Climate change: Rapidly retreating glaciers in West Antarctica | Nature Communications | Nature wallet

A research paper indicates that from 2018 to 2019, the Cadman Glacier on the Antarctic Peninsula retreated rapidly due to rising ocean temperatures, and the speed of ice movement, which had been stable for a long time, increased by about 94%.Nature CommunicationsPublished in These findings indicate that the glaciers located on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula are retreating rapidly, highlighting that the effects of future climate change will be felt most heavily on the Antarctic Peninsula.

It is known that the retreat of Antarctica’s glaciers is destabilizing the Antarctic ice sheet and causing sea levels to rise. The collapse of the Larsen Ice Shelf has focused researchers’ attention on the glaciers of the East Antarctic Peninsula. The glaciers on the West Antarctic Peninsula (such as the Cadman Glacier), on the other hand, were under different meteorological and oceanographic conditions and were more stable than those on the East Antarctic Peninsula for more than half a century.

Benjamin Wallis and his colleagues used satellite observation data and oceanographic measurements to examine the stability of Cadman Glacier from 1991 to 2022. They found that Cadman Glacier had been stable for more than 50 years, but then began to accelerate, causing the glacier’s ice shelf to collapse. In addition, ice loss was increasing by about 0.5 gigatons per year. The Cadman Glacier carving front retreated 8 km between November 2018 and December 2019, with ice melting at a rate of 20 meters per year during the same period. Wallis and others attribute the retreat of Cadman Glacier to the presence of a waterway located at a depth of 400 metres, suggesting that this channel allows abnormally warm seawater to be pumped from the upper layer of the ocean into the glacier.

This result indicates that thermal forcing from warm seawater is rapidly creating a dynamic imbalance in the glaciers of the Antarctic Peninsula, increasing the amount of ice runoff, and indicates that this region is more resilient to warming. Ocean temperature. It highlights weaknesses.

doi:10.1038/s41467-023-42970-4

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