Hektoria Glacier in Antarctica retreated 15 miles in 15 months, the fastest modern grounded ice loss ever recorded

[Dom9]

A paper published in Nature Geoscience and picked up by ScienceDaily on May 19th confirmed that Antarctica's Hektoria Glacier underwent the fastest modern grounded ice retreat ever documented. Between January 2022 and March 2023 the glacier lost approximately 25 kilometres of length, with the peak retreat reaching half a mile per day in November and December 2022. The research was led by Naomi Ochwat at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The mechanism involves a flat seabed below sea level that allowed the glacier to briefly become buoyant before fracturing in massive slabs. Scientists call these glacial earthquakes and they were captured in real time by seismic sensors. The glacier has now lost so much mass that the retreat is slowing, described by Ted Scambos as being on its way to becoming a fjord rather than a glacier.

Antarctic glacier collapses at record speed as Hektoria retreats 15 miles in just 15 monthswww.sciencedaily.com

[WildManCena23]

Half a mile per day of glacial retreat is not something most people's mental model of ice loss can accommodate. The scale of the event and the speed are both records simultaneously

[Zero-Point]

The flat seabed buoyancy mechanism is what makes this alarming beyond Hektoria specifically. If other glaciers have similar underlying topography the same rapid collapse mechanism is latent and waiting

[Bussin]

Becoming a fjord rather than a glacier is not a metaphor. Scambos is describing a permanent state change. The ice mass that existed there is not coming back on any human timescale

[Upsilon]

The fact that the collapse was captured in near real time by seismic sensors is the monitoring success story inside the bad news. We can see these events happening now which we could not reliably do a decade ago

[Glenn]

Cheers for that. That makes sense actually.

Proper useful that

[Megan34]

The sea level contribution from Hektoria specifically is small because it was not a large glacier. The concern is the mechanism. If Thwaites, which is large, has similar flat bedrock geometry the implications are orders of magnitude larger

[Seb83]

Ten times faster than previous records is the specific claim in the paper. That is not a marginal exceedance. The previous records were set by events considered extreme at the time

[TristanFenwick]

The 2022 to 2023 timing is recent enough that most people have heard nothing about it. The scientific paper takes years from data collection to publication. The event happened and most public discourse missed it entirely

[CobyOlaleye]

Nature Geoscience publication means this has been through rigorous peer review. The finding has survived scrutiny from the most skeptical reviewers in the field

[FrostDrifter]

The Frazer Christie and Anna Hogg caveats about the satellite data precision are worth reading. The science is robust but the exact mechanism is still being debated at the detailed level

[CodyRhodes99]

Sad news ?