Thwaites Glacier - New Data Show Warm (mid-30s F) Seawater Penetrates Daily Miles Beyond Grounding Line

EDIT

Using satellite radar data from the private company ICEYE collected over 3 months in 2023, a team of glaciologists created a detailed image of Thwaites’s shifting grounding line by looking at how the glacier surface bobbed up and down throughout the day. “The difference with this study is that they were having multiple measurements per day,” said Alex Brisbourne, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey who was not involved with the research. “So what they could see [were] these really short-timescale processes.”

Satellites can see only the surface of the ice, but because the ice is compacted, tiny vertical movements signal that the glacier bed must be rising too, wrote Eric Rignot in an email. Rignot is a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and first author of the study.

The team found that the ice rose and sank in sync with the tides. The data suggested that the grounding line migrated up to 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) inland during an average high tide.

When the tides were particularly high, the glacier’s uplift suggested that a thin layer of seawater up to 10 centimeters (4 inches) deep pushed another 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) inland. The researchers think that this extra water may be causing more melting than current estimates predict because it replaces cold melted fresh water that lines the base of the glacier with warmer, salty seawater.

EDIT

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/7/14/2254118/-Thwaites-Glacier-gets-a-daily-bath-of-warm-water-melting-inland-ice-miles-past-the-grounding-line?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web