Overview
- A roughly 40-person international team has set sail from New Zealand aboard the icebreaker Araon to study Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier up close.
- The expedition will fly airborne radar over the ice and tag seals with sensors to collect temperature and salinity data from hard-to-reach waters.
- Researchers aim to refine forecasts by observing how warm ocean water reaches the glacier’s underside and drives grounding-line retreat on bedrock that deepens inland.
- Thwaites is roughly the size of Florida and contains enough ice to raise global sea level by about two feet, with a wider West Antarctic collapse viewed as a longer-term risk that could add many more feet.
- Recent studies raise confidence that irreversible retreat is possible but leave its timing uncertain, and 2024 modeling suggests rapid ice-cliff failure is less likely even as 2025 fossil-fuel emissions hit record highs.