Slashdot Mirror
A Hole Opens Up Under Antarctic Glacier -- Big Enough To Fit Two-Thirds of Manhattan (nbcnews.com)
Scientists have discovered an enormous void under an Antarctic glacier, sparking concern that the ice sheet is melting faster than anyone had realized -- and spotlighting the dire threat posed by rising seas to coastal cities around the world, including New York City and Miami. From a report: The cavity under Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is about six miles long and 1,000 feet deep -- representing the loss of 14 billion tons of ice. It was discovered after an analysis of data collected by Italian and German satellites, as well as NASA's Operation IceBridge, a program in which aircraft equipped with ice-penetrating radar fly over polar regions to study the terrain. The discovery is described in a paper published Jan. 30 in the journal Science Advances. The researchers expected to see significant loss of ice, but the scale of the void came as a shock.
Why didn't it melt across the expanse instead of just the center? This seems more like geothermal heat, as it is more directed. Climate change heating would have produced channels instead as it would follow currents which would expand across the entire glacier, not just the center.