This is the Denman Glacier, which holds such a volume of ice that it would be equivalent to raising sea levels by 1.5 meters if it ever melted in its entirety.
East Antarctica’s Denman Glacier is melting at a rate of 70.8 billion tonnes a year, according to researchers at Australia’s national science service, due to an influx of warm seawater.
The researchers, led by senior scientist Esmee van Wijk, said their observations suggest Denman Glacier is potentially at risk of unstable retreat, according to the Guardian website. The glacier, in remote East Antarctica, sits above the deepest land canyon on Earth and holds such a volume of ice that it would raise sea levels by 1.5 meters if it ever melted in its entirety.
Until relatively recently, it was thought that East Antarctica would not experience the same rapid ice loss as it does in the West. However, some recent studies have shown that warm water also reaches this part of the frozen continent.
Australian scientists carried out special measurements to determine how much warm water reaches the deep valley that runs under the glacier. Initially, they intended to study another glacier – Totten – but when the float moved away, they approached Denman.
A floater collected data every five days for four months starting in December 2020. From this data, scientists estimated how quickly the warm water is causing the front of the glacier floating in the sea to melt.
Melting of the floating part does not contribute to sea level rise. But Stephen Rintoul, a research team associate and one of the study’s authors, said that as the glacier thins, it provides less resistance to the flow of ice from Antarctica to the ocean.
“It’s the ice that flows from Antarctica into the ocean that raises the sea level,” he said. Rintoul added that the slope beneath Denman Glacier makes it potentially unstable and at risk of irreversible retreat.
He said the data – the first to use measurements taken from the ocean – added to a growing body of scientific work suggesting that East Antarctica “is likely to contribute more to sea level rise than we thought”.
Other recent research concluded that after accounting for snowfall, Denman had still lost about 268 billion tons of ice – about 7 billion tons per year – between 1979 and 2017.
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