On December 11, the international scientific community announced a shocking discovery about the reason why the Thwaites ice sheet - known as the "Autumn Festival ice River" - is melting faster than expected.
According to the latest research in the journal Nature Geosciences, the chaotic water whirlpools underwater, also known as "underwater storms", are actively eroding the base of the most important ice continents in the South.
For decades, experts have identified warming ocean waters as the main cause of ice melting. However, this was the first time they discovered a short-term attack mechanism calculated in the hour and day of the ocean.
Yoshihiro Nakayama, a research author from Dartmouth University, described these underground storms as actually round, high-speed whirlpools with diameters of up to nearly 10km. To make it easier to imagine, NASA expert Mattia Poinelli compared them to small spheres that appear when we use a spoon to stir strongly into a cup of coffee, but on a huge scale in the middle of the ocean.
The mechanism of operation of this phenomenon is considered extremely dangerous. tornadoes form when hot and cold water collide, then quickly crash into the icebergs. Here, they act as a giant agitator, boiling warm water from the bottom up and attacking the weakest points at the icebed.
Data analysis results show that these underground storms alone have caused up to 20% of the melting ice volume of the two largest icelets in the South in just 9 months, a figure that is surprising to experts.
More worryingly, the researchers pointed to a dangerous feedback loop. When storms melt ice, they create a deposit of cold fresh water that flows into the ocean. This water continues to mix with warmer salinity water below, creating greater chaos, thereby creating many new underground storms and accelerating the rate of ice melting.
Experte Lia Siegelman from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography warned that as the global climate warms, these storms will increase in intensity and destructive power.
The consequences of this phenomenon directly threaten the survival of coastal cities around the world. The Thwaites River currently acts as a giant "bottleneck" to retain the Southwest ice belt. It itself contains enough water to make the sea level rise 60cm. However, if it collapses due to the attack of underground storms, it will lead to the collapse of the entire chain of the area, leading to a scenario where sea levels rise to more than 3m.
