5 CITIES THAT ARE VULNERABLE TO RISING SEAS
THE THWAITES GLACIER IS ABOUT THE SIZE OF A U.S. SWING STATE AND holds enough ice to raise sea levels by about 10 feet. This alone is scary enough to justify its nickname, the Doomsday Glacier, but there’s more. The Thwaites sits along a 75-mile stretch of shoreline in Antarctica that serves to partially shield the vast West Antarctic Ice Sheet from the warm ocean waters. The WAIS has enough ice to raise the seas by 200 feet.
Forty years ago, the Thwaites was thought to be shedding 40 billion tons of water each year. Scientists recently upped that figure to 250 billion tons. To their alarm, a river of warm water appears to be flowing beneath the glacier, which can only hasten the day when it collapses into the sea—it could be a century from now, or a few decades. No one really knows.
We haven’t even talked about Greenland yet. Another underground river of warm water was recently discovered under
