Heat is on to stop world's biggest ice cube from melting and causing doom
Boffins are battling to stop the world’s biggest ice cube from melting and wrecking the planet.
Thwaites Glacier - a 74,000 square miles of frozen water on the western edge of Antarctic - is shrinking due to global warming. It is losing 50billion more tons of ice than it receives from fresh snowfall and is already responsible for 4% of the world’s sea level rise.
Dubbed the “Doomsday Glacier”, if it melts sea levels across the globe will rise by 10ft putting coastal cities underwater. Parts of Norfolk, North Yorkshire, East and West Sussex and Wales would be swallowed up and Belfast would flood.
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Professor John Moore, from Cambridge University, wants to slow down melting by anchoring a 62-mile long sea curtain to the seabed to stop warm ocean water from attacking the glacier from beneath.
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He is is confident the 29 countries signed up to the Antarctic Treaty will fund the £40billion project.
Most of the ice Thwaites loses comes from underneath where warm, salty waters circulating deep down in the sea wear it away.
As the climate warms the deep ocean currents get hotter - melting the glacier’s underside even faster.
John, research professor of climate change at the University of Lapland’s Arctic Centre in Finland said: “Beyond the tipping point glaciers like Thwaites just collapse regardless of the CO2 concentration because the buttressing they need to be stable goes away as the floating shelf thins, like kicking away a prop holding up a fence," he said.
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“So if we want to replace the buttressing we need to mimic nature and allow the shelf to thicken again and buttress itself.
“The way to reduce the melt is to block off some of the warm water reaching it.’’
His team plans to anchor a curtain with a buoyant top edge at the bottom of the Amundsen Sea to block underwater currents from hitting the glacier’s underside.
Cambridge University is currently working on computer simulations and fish tank tests to ensure they get the design right before installing a prototype in the River Cam in the city next summer.
It would then be tested on a Norwegian fjord before being deployed on the glacier.
John said it was a risky business due to the "harsh conditions, the short working season with enough daylight and the danger from the many icebergs that are around."
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