Large marine-terminating glacier in West Antarctica, nicknamed the "Doomsday Glacier"; with Pine Island Glacier it loses the most ice on the continent.
Thwaites Glacier kept losing ice for all 150 simulated years in three models with ocean melting set to zero, New Scientist reports. The setup is physically impossible, so it shows the glacier's momentum but not how much sea level will rise.
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UC Irvine and JPL glaciologists project up to 30 mm of Thwaites sea-level rise by 2100, twice earlier estimates, even with no added warming. Replacing the grounding line with a grounding zone made the model's reconstruction of past change four times more pronounced.
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Caroline Needell's team found the tallest glacier cliffs retreating faster than models predict, yet none showed unstable retreat in satellite data. That moves the sea-level question to whether faster flow can thin the cliffs before they fail.
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Researchers reviewing East Antarctica's Wilkes Subglacial Basin say its ice would raise seas 3 to 4 metres if it all melted. The basin shrank sharply in past climates 2 to 3 degrees warmer, yet too little ocean data exists to project how fast it could retreat now.
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The IMBIE team merged 42 independent satellite surveys from 27 missions to account for 11.3 trillion tonnes of ice lost from Greenland and Antarctica since 1979, and it assigns 84% of that loss to glaciers accelerating into the ocean.
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The events lack the high-frequency energy that standard detection depends on, which is why they went uncatalogued. The busiest stretch, 2018 to 2020, lines up with a satellite-confirmed speed-up of the Thwaites ice tongue.
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