The Antarctic glacier that could raise sea levels by 1.5m

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Why is a remote glacier in Antarctica that contains enough water to raise global sea levels by 1.5 metres melting twice as fast on one side as the other?

That’s the question facing Australian scientists who have spent the past three summers at a remote outpost in the Bunger Hills, 450 kilometres from Casey research station in East Antarctica.

Dr Sarah Thompson, a glaciologist with the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership, said Denman Glacier was of interest because it contained so much water.

“The Denman Glacier is one of the largest and the fastest, and the one that we’re most concerned about because we think it has around 1.5 metres [of] potential sea level rise contribution – though we don’t really have any idea about when that will happen, either the magnitude or the timing,” Thompson said.

Denman Glacier flows off the side of the continent alongside the Scott Glacier and into the floating Shackleton Ice Shelf. The frozen river is 110 kilometres long, 11-16km wide and at least 3.5km deep, making it one of the deepest places on Earth bar deep ocean trenches.

A 2021 paper in The Cryosphere used satellite imagery to show the “grounding line” – the point at which the ice is no longer grounded on the continent and starts to float on the ocean – had shifted over the past 50 years, suggesting the melting of the glacier was accelerating.

Thompson said once the glacier started to float, it flowed five metres a day – fast by glacial standards.

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