The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is eroding from the sea, and is threatening to retreat and collapse within decades to centuries, as it flows faster and faster each year. If so, it could attract much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. There is enough ice in this area to raise sea levels by as much as 10 feet. School of Science professor Scott Tyler, along with his lab manager Chris Kratt, are working with an international team of scientists to determine how quickly that will happen.

“Based on the latest research, the floating portion of Thwaites Glacier could collapse in as little as three to five years,” says Tyler, a hydrologist and International Thwaites Glacier Community (ITGC) team member. says. “After that, little can be done to stop the melting of West Antarctica’s glaciers and remaining ice into the ocean, which could ultimately lead to a significant rise in global sea levels. How long that will take remains to be seen.” It’s an open scientific question, but we’re not talking geological time here, decades to centuries, coastal areas will need to moderate in the years to decades to come and decisions need to be made. I have.

“Our work is aimed at narrowing the timing window, knowing what to expect and building critical infrastructure along the coastline, such as cities, shipping ports, petrochemical facilities and even sewage treatment plants. We can make effective and efficient plans for how to protect the coastline that we have today.”

To give you an overview of the size of the glacier, it is slightly larger than Florida. It averages over a mile thick, with some above the waterline and some below. The ITGC is an international project supported by the National Science Foundation in the United States and the National Environmental Research Council in the United Kingdom, currently called “Domesday Glacier.”

“Warm seawater intrusion is the culprit that could lead to the pulling of corks that are preventing snow and ice masses from entering the sea,” Kratt said.

The team focuses on a 60-kilometer-wide ice shelf at the front end of Thwaites Glacier, which extends beyond the coastline of Antarctica and forms an 800-foot-thick floating ice shelf in the Amundsen Sea.

Tyler and Cratt are using state-of-the-art laser technology to monitor both the temperature and vibration of about a mile long fiber optic cable that runs through the ice shelf and into the ocean below. The cable acts as a thermometer, continuously measuring temperature about every 20 inches in both ice and water. This allows the team to monitor ice shelf thickness, tidal currents and warm water intrusion under the floating shelf. Vibration monitoring is a pilot study that will continue later this year.

Tyler and Klatt, from the School of Geological Sciences and Engineering, began working with the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration in 2019, bringing their experience with fiber optic distributed temperature sensing technology to the project. Tyler has experience in Antarctica, where from 2011 until 2013 he led a team drilling boreholes in the McMurdo Ice Shelf and using fiber optics to measure ice and seawater temperatures.

Their current project is called TARSAN (Thwaites Amundsen Regional Survey and Network) and is led by Oregon State University. The University of Colorado, the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Temple University are US collaborators along with several UK institutions. This is his one of eight projects that make up the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration. This research program is the largest and most complex scientific field program on a single glacier in Antarctic history.

The TARSAN project site, where two automated multi-sensor stations were installed on the Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf in January 2020, is about 800 miles from McMurdo Station’s main U.S. Antarctic base. West Antarctica is the stormiest region of the world’s stormiest continent. Two automated stations record weather data, GPS positions, and fiber optic temperature profiles all year round, even in the harshest weather. This includes hurricane force winds that partially collapsed an instrument tower and tore off two solar panels. A snowfall buried the lower station’s equipment under 20 feet of snow. Part of the data was uploaded daily by satellite phones.

“Chris went to Antarctica in November 2021 to set up moorings and get a full complement of data,” Tyler said. Luckily, the tower was properly wired and despite being partially buried in snow and hit by high winds, the elements It endured and saved the full dataset.”

Getting to the research site was no easy task.

“The first flight started with a chartered NSF airline/flight with many researchers on board in Albany, NY,” Kratt said. “We had a four-day isolated quarantine before boarding, then arrived in New Zealand masked for nearly 24 hours, then had a long layover in Hawaii. Once there, they quarantined us in a hotel room for another two weeks, then flew another eight-and-a-half hours in a military-grade C-130 aircraft to land on ice and land at McMurdo Base.”

In addition to the usual operational challenges in Antarctica, there were logistical challenges related to Covid-19. His scheduled three-week field trip continued to shrink until he finally made it to his WAIS Divide, a summer base where his TARSAN team of five was located off McMurdo Station. I traveled on an hour flight.

“Despite having 20 people in the camp and 24 hours of sunshine, the average temperature was consistently well below freezing,” Kratt said.

The team camped for nine days at a remote base. Due to poor weather, the team had only three days of good weather in which he made the four-hour, 600-mile round trip in a small Twin Otter aircraft from WAIS Divide to the Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf Observatory.

“Most of the three-day trips in and out are cold and boring with only flat ice, snow, or clouds to see on a two-hour flight, but the closer you get to the coast, the more surreal it gets. It’s an exciting way,” Kratt said. “One of the first things he sees is a gigantic fissure, which is a crack in the ice of the glacier, then the shattered edge of the ice shelf. Some crevasses show ‘dirty ice.’ I’m here. This is a refrozen sediment in which muddy water seeps upward into cracks in the ice bottom. I could see something spectacular on either side of the plane. ”

Kratt described what they saw as they approached the research site: as far as the eye can see.

When a small plane landed at two automated station locations (a few miles apart), Klatt could see the damage done by the strong winds of a Category 5 hurricane. A telecommunications data tower was bent, one supporting cable was severed, and one solar panel was hanging by wires, barely hanging above the snow. Recording equipment was buried under 20 feet of hard snow.

“After all the equipment was deployed, no one was left out of the 2021 field season because of COVID,” says Kratt. “Data was received daily by satellite modems (very slow). However, this system had been field-tested several years ago in a previous study on the McMurdo Ice Shelf that measured ice shelf and ocean temperatures, so comparisons It was reliable.”

Using chainsaws and shovels, they dug a large stepped hole and descended to the bottom to retrieve part of the instrument buried in 20 feet of snow.

“We were very lucky to have that equipment, especially in the limited time we had,” Kratt said. “Fortunately, the pilot participated in the drilling.”

While the pilots were busy drilling, Kratt was busy downloading all of the distributed temperature sensing data.

“It was very reassuring to see all the data intact and retrievable,” he said. “The reduced time required us to be more organized and reprioritize what we could do.”

On January 27, 2022, he returned from Antarctica with a treasure trove of ocean temperatures under a 14-month long ice shelf.

“The DTS system worked very well through the first two years of monitoring, but there was a mid-winter power interruption,” says Tyler. “We have an excellent thermal profile, and we see a significant thinning and stabilization of the ice-boundary layer in year two, but basal melting is very modest at both mooring sites. ”

Moorings and fiber optics will continue to collect data under the ice shelf until at least early 2023. Oregon State University’s Erin Pettit will lead her TARSAN team during her 2023 field season to recover DTS data and conduct seismic surveys (vibration studies) using lasers and fiber optic cables.

Tyler is a professor at the UNR Foundation and Center for the Transformative Environmental Sensing Program, a National Science Foundation-backed instrumentation center focused on distributed fiber optic sensing, remote sensing for unmanned aerial vehicles, and the development of innovative environmental sensors. is also the director of

Kratt teaches Applied Geophysics and is the manager of the CTEMPS Institute.

For more information on the entire project, please visit the ITGC project website.