New Study Shows Antarctic “Doomsday Glacier” Thicker than 8,000 Years Ago

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New Study Shows Antarctic “Doomsday Glacier” Thicker than 8,000 Years Ago
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Scientists have determined there is no measured data to “indicate thicker than present ice after 4ka” at a West Antarctic study site near the Thwaites “Doomsday” Glacier. Any ice melt observed today is thus “reversible”… and natural.

The Thwaites, Pine Island, and Pope Glaciers in the Amundsen Sea region of West Antarctica are all situated on a hotbed of active geothermal heat flux, which has led to anomalously high regional melt rates. Indeed, “there is a conspicuously large amount of heat from Earth’s interior beneath the ice” in the very locations where the ice melt is most pronounced.

While the Earth’s crust has an average thickness of about 40 km, in the Thwaites-Pine Island-Pope Glacier region the anomalously thinner crust (10 to 18 km) more readily exposes the base of the ice to 580°C tectonic trenches. The “elevated geothermal heat flow band is interpreted as caused by an anomalously thin crust underlain by a hot mantle,” which is exerting a “profound influence on the flow dynamics of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet” (Dziadek et al., 2021).

Despite the established natural causes of ice melt this region (see also Schroeder et al., 2014, Loose et al., 2018), it has nonetheless become commonplace for those who believe human behaviors are the climate’s “control knob” to claim the melting of the Thwaites Glacier – dubbed the “Doomsday Glacier” by alarmists – is caused by humans driving gasoline-powered trucks or using natural gas for energy.

But a new study categorically undermines claims that the ice melt occurring in the Thwaites-Pine Island-Pope Glacier region is unusual, unprecedented, or unnatural.

The thickness of the ice sheet at this Amundsen Sea region site averages about 40 m today.

Scientists (Balco et al., 2023) have used cosmogenic-nuclide concentrations and bedrock cores to determine the ice sheet is presently around 8 times thicker than it was for most of the last 8,000 years of the Holocene, when the ice thickness ranged between 2 m and 7 m.

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