"Doomsday" Glacier Is Melting! Scientists Want to Hang a Curtain Under It

Thwaites Glacier, the "Doomsdy Glacier", is melting from below. Scientists want to slow it down with a curtain 80km long, as tall as 40-storey building, anchored 600 meters down on the Antarctic seabed. Thwaites is about the size of Great Britain. It loses around 50 billion tonnes of ice a year, roughly 4% of all sea-level rise on Earth, and if it melted completely it would raise the world's seas by about 65 cm. The threat isn't warm air. It's warm deep ocean water that flows along valleys in the seabed and eats the ice from underneath. Nothing has been build yet. This Animated explainer follows the plan, the first measurements, and the reasons it might fail. Chapters 0:00 A curtain at the bottom of the worlds 0:49 A river of ice: how Thwaites flows 2:05 The attack from: warm water and melting 3:03 A curtain in the deep: how it would work 4:55 The first measurements (2026) 6:43 Why it might fail Earthwright explains how the world is built, one animated story at a time. Subscribe for the next one.