According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in a January 30 press release, a giant cavity was discovered under the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, measuring two-thirds of Manhattan's area and 300 meters high. And this cavity is constantly growing.
This cavity was first allegedly discovered as part of NASA's Operation IceBridge - the 2010 air campaign, but confirmation of its existence and the final size of the formation have only now been obtained, thanks to the analysis of data from new satellites with radar interferometry.
The Thwaites Glacier has long attracted the attention of scientists in its own right. It is a glacier the size of Florida and is believed to be responsible for 4 percent of the global sea level rise seen in recent decades.
Since 1992, the glacier has been melting continuously, breaking away from the rock and sliding at a constant speed of about 0.6–0.8 km per year. At the same time, if the glacier melts completely, then the resulting water will be enough to raise the world ocean level by 65 centimeters, which will inevitably lead to flooding of large areas.
However, as it now appears, the glacier is melting much faster than anticipated and the cavity observed in it is caused by the melting of an additional 14 billion tons of ice. At the same time, most of this volume has melted over the past three years, and if the process accelerates, the consequences of the rise in ocean level will become noticeable even without careful measurements - the inhabitants of the coast will see this rise all. And this will be an even more favorable development of events.
Now NASA is primarily interested in the reasons for the melting of ice, of which, by and large, there can be only two.
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For now, NASA hopes that the melting of the glacier is associated with a long-standing subglacial cavity linking the center of the glacier to the warmer sea. As a result of this contact, the glacier is eroded. However, so far no evidence of such contact has been found, so NASA is organizing a two-year expedition to the glacier in order to explore everything in as much detail as possible and find the alleged contact.
The second likely cause of melting may be volcanic activity, that is, magma rising to the surface, which heats everything up. So far, NASA does not report any discovered subglacial volcanoes, however, if a volcano is responsible for the formation of a giant cavity, then the glacier will melt very, very quickly, even without a serious eruption. But if a volcano begins to erupt, if other volcanoes wake up under the ice of Antarctica, the world may face very fast and truly catastrophic events.