Thwaites Glacier May Melt Faster Than Thought
Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier may be losing ice faster than scientists thought.
AI-narrated. Written with AI and checked against primary sources. Our standards
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The story
A new study in the journal Nature Communications, from glaciologists at UC Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, rebuilt the glacier in a computer model. The key change: instead of a thin line where ice lifts off the seafloor, the model includes a grounding zone, two to five kilometers wide, where warm ocean water seeps underneath and melts the ice from below.
With that added, the model finally matched about three decades of real retreat. Run forward, it projects Thwaites could add up to 30 millimeters, about 1.2 inches, to global sea level by 2100.
The glacier could come loose from a seafloor ridge that holds it in place as early as 2038.
That's roughly double earlier projections, even without more warming. The glacier could come loose from a seafloor ridge that holds it in place as early as 2038.
Sources
The primary documents behind this story, with direct links to each one.
- Sea-level contribution from Thwaites Glacier doubles in an observation-constrained ice-sheet model (Poinelli et al.)
- UC Irvine, NASA JPL: Melting of Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier worse than thought
Image and footage credits: Lead image: Poinelli, M., Rignot, E., Seroussi, H. et al. Nat Commun 17, 10364 (2026), Fig. 1a. CC BY 4.0. Cropped to panel a and placed on a 16:9 canvas. · CC BY 4.0 · Poinelli, M., Rignot, E., Seroussi, H. et al. Nat Commun 17, 10364 (2026), Fig. 1. CC BY 4.0. · CC BY 4.0 · Original Wunder News motion graphics with public-domain agency imagery.
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