Pine Island and Thwaites: The two Antarctic glaciers that could define the destiny of humanity

It is about the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers, two of the largest in the world, and that together could cause the water to rise 11 feet (3.35 meters) as it melts. The good news is that its collapse is not totally imminent, but the bad news is that the latest studies suggest that they are melting faster than we thought, and we could have problems in the short term. For us to get used to the idea, a rise of about one meter (3 feet) in sea level would cause constant flooding in coastal cities. With almost 2 meters of rise (6 feet) would cause massive migrations with millions of displaced people around the world, with cities like Shanghai or Bombay taking the worst part.

But a rise of 3.35 meters, the 11 feet that have the power to raise the sea level these glaciers to melt, would cause the areas inhabited by hundreds of millions of people around the world to end under the sea, causing few large coastal cities that were saved like New York gigantic floods at least twice a month. As they point out in Wired, scientists are comparing the current situation with that of the late ice age 11,000 years ago, when global temperatures were at a level similar to today’s. Doing so they have discovered that at that time these two glaciers melted at a great speed causing rapid rises in sea level.

The total collapse of Pine Island and Thwaites would trigger a catastrophe. They would move away from Antarctica, causing high tides to increase slowly, burying all the coastal lines of the planet and flooding their cities causing millions of climate refugees. And according to these scientists, this could happen in only 20 or 50 years. The calculations have been made taking as reference the speed at which the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland is being destroyed today, and reducing it by half to have relatively conservative results. But they warn that there are reasons to think that these two glaciers could be destroyed even faster.

All this concern stems from a study recently published by scientists from the universities of Massachusetts-Amherst and Penn State in the journal Nature, and that have increased the speed at which they believe that sea levels will rise. Instead of climbing 1 meter by the end of the century, they calculate that the sea level could rise twice as much as 2,100. Very bad news for everyone. At the moment Pine Island and Thwaites are protected by a giant ice shelf that helps contain the flow of ice to the sea, but there are other studies that suggest that it is destroying itself by leaps and bounds, and when this happens things will start to get very very ugly.