What Congress grasps about the most threatening glacier on Earth

Some 8,000 miles from the elegantly carpeted U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., lies an eerie, dark, underwater place — a place that threatens to redraw maps all over the globe. This realm, found under a nearly 2,000-foot-thick slab of ice in Antarctica, is where one of the planet's largest glaciers, the Florida-sized Thwaites Glacier, meets the rocky ocean floor.

Antarctic scientists are fixated on this subterranean place, called Thwaites' "grounding zone." It acts like a brake, holding Thwaites back from purging unstoppable rivers of ice into the sea, which alone could raise sea levels by over two feet — but may unleash up to eight more feetof sea level rise from its glacial neighbors. "Thwaites is the one spot in Antarctica that has the potential to dump an enormous amount of water into the ocean over the next decades," said Sridhar Anandakrishnan, a professor of glaciology at Penn State University. This critical meeting of ice and rock is retreating back around half a mile each year, and researchers long suspected warmer ocean waters were to blame. They were right.

For the first time, a team of scientists in January adventured to Thwaites' stormy, icy plains, and drilled a hole to the elusive grounding zone. They lowered a probe down the 2,000-foot void and discovered the saltwater was 2 degrees above freezing. That's bad, if you're a glacier. "That's really warm for a glacier," said David Holland, the director of New York University’s Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory who traveled to Antarctica for the recent expedition. "That's why the glacier is thinning and retreating."

How quickly will Thwaites melt? Even 10 years out, we don't know what Thwaites will look like. "It's completely unclear," said Anandakrishnan.

What's clear, however, is Thwaites' relentless retreat is ultimately driven by a warming atmosphere. These changes are far outside the realm of what most members of Congress — empowered to make supreme laws of the land that determine the nation's fate — can easily grasp. There's good news and pretty bad news when it comes to what the 535 members of Congress realize about the most threatening glacier on Earth — and critically, the necessity to rapidly slash carbon emissions to potentially curb Thwaites' melt.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, is a champion of climate change, having now given 265 speeches on the Senate floor about the heating climate. But Whitehouse acknowledges his colleagues, particularly Republicans, have little to no clue about the momentous observations U.S. scientists are now making in Earth's remote, but increasingly ominous, polar regions.

"The bubble senators live in is fairly artificial," said Whitehouse. "They're in a disconnected position from reality." (This doesn’t apply just to Republicans. Democrats, however, are the party that almost exclusively calls for cutting carbon emissions.)

Accordingly, the U.S. Senate, a place once described as "composed of eloquent advocates" and "wise magistrates," is doing very little to drive meaningful climate policy. What's more, senators don't see a path forward today, especially when President Donald Trump, who dismissed a dire, years-in-the-making, congressionally-mandated climate report from top U.S. scientists, sits at the Resolute desk.

"We're not doing much legislatively," Whitehouse acknowledged. "People will look at [this time] as a dark era in American history."

The hole drilled to reach Thwaites' grounding zone in January 2020. Credit: David holland / nyu / nyu abu dhabi Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. Credit: NASA / GSFC / SVS

But for Whitehouse, at least, the deluge of unsettling news out of Antarctica, including a recent bout of Los Angeles-like temperatures, throws more wood on the fire.

"It's motivating as hell," Whitehouse said. "It gives you that dreadful feeling when something you fear might happen suddenly becomes more immediate."

Unlike the Senate, however, the House of Representatives is commanded by a powerful Democrat, Nancy Pelosi, who in 2019 created the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. The committee's job is to create a grand report to make "ambitious climate policy recommendations to Congress." It's chaired by Rep. Kathy Castor, a Democrat from Florida, perhaps the state most vulnerable to rising seas (a live octopus even washed into a Miami parking garage during high tide).

"It's motivating as hell."

Castor said her committee is on the cusp of releasing this unprecedented report, the Congressional Climate Action Framework, by the end of March.

"It will help the U.S. prepare for some of the worst impacts of climate change — including the effects of a destabilized Antarctica," Castor said.

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The report's basic framework prioritizes listening to scientists and slashing carbon pollution, but also includes preparing for climate-enhanced disasters, like more intense, pummeling storms. That's wise, because it's almost certain global civilization will blow through the warming limit set by the historic U.N. Paris climate agreement, which seeks to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 Fahrenheit, above 19th-century levels. That means markedly more severe, extreme weather.

The need to curb warming, even if we miss the most ambitious climate targets, is at least well understood by many of Castor's Democratic colleagues. "There is a hunger for action," she said. "We have to get to net-zero carbon emissions as fast as possible."

The warming atmosphere is driving stronger polar westerly winds, which drives warmer waters into Thwaites. Credit: nasa / NSIDC How relatively warmer ocean currents seep under the ends of Antarctic glaciers, like Thwaites. Credit: NSIDC / NASA

The problem, of course, is Castor might not get much help from Republicans, who since the 1980s have been deeply suspicious of environmental science. Today, it's a refusal to listen to climate scientists. This party could largely be Thwaites' undoing, as the U.S. is the second-biggest carbon emitter on Earth and the largest historical carbon polluter overall. "The Republicans have made opposition to climate change a rallying cry for the conservative grassroots," James Turner, a U.S. environmental historian at Wellesley College, told Mashable after a sad showing by the United States at a major climate conference in December 2018.

The Republican climate plan is the recently unveiled Trillion Trees Act, which aims to plant 1 trillion trees globally by 2050 to soak up carbon from the air — while ignoring the reality that fire-ravaged American forests are already suffering from gross overcrowding. "We have an obligation to conserve our resources and make them available to future generations, and I challenge anyone to find a better climate solution than taking care of our forests," Rep. Bruce Westerman, a Republican of Arkansas, said in a statement. Planting 1 trillion trees would absorb carbon, but it wouldn't remotely solve Earth's growing carbon emissions problem.

And by 2050, Thwaites may have already collapsed.

But it's unlikely Republicans will support actually slashing carbon emissions anytime soon. In March 2019, Castor introduced a simple bill in the House, the Climate Action Now Act, which sought to do the bare minimum on climate policy: keep the U.S. from leaving the Paris Agreement. "We had only three Republicans vote for that very simple resolution," said Castor. (The Senate hasn't taken it up.)

At the Trump administration's behest, the U.S. will officially leave the climate agreement in November, the only nation to do so. This won't help slow Thwaites' retreat, which is more serious than the whole of Congress realizes.

"It is a tremendous rate of retreat," said Penn State's Anandakrishnan.

Thwaites could very well fulfill its fate as a "Doomsday Glacier," melting past its grounding zone and then relentlessly dumping ice into the sea.

"These things are coming to get us."

"We've never watched this happen before," said Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Those ocean temperature numbers right at the grounding line are a sign that Antarctica is really in trouble."

Should Congress treat Thwaites' underwater melting — in a place so remote and whose collapse could be decades away — as an immediate threat? "All signs point to it being a big deal," emphasized Willis.

Many members of today's Congress will be long dead, in a few decades. But they'll have had the opportunity to listen to scientists bringing back grim news from the farthest reaches of the planet. Thwaites' consequences, already contributing 4 percent to global sea level rise, will be seen everywhere. "These things are coming to get us," said Willis.

But in Washington, Thwaites has a big disadvantage: the prodigious amounts of money fossil fuel companies give to Congress. As a new study starkly concluded, "The more a given member of Congress votes against environmental policies, the more contributions they receive from oil and gas companies supporting their reelection." Led by Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron, oil and gas lobbyists spent $124,697,322 in 2019. That's how you buy votes.

"The whole thing floats on a sea of smelly, dark money," said Whitehouse.

Earth's skyrocketing CO2 concentrations. Credit: scripps institution of oceanography

The brighter news, noted Whitehouse, is that the U.S. electorate overall now sees climate change as a critical, top-tier problem. And the Democrats running for president generally have robust, unprecedented climate plans. "That's a very positive feeling," he said.

But, noted Castor, any significant climate policy to reduce still-skyrocketing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere (which are now rising at rates that are unprecedented in historic and geologic history) may have to contend with powerful Republicans. They are forthright about obstructing Democratic plans, but not publicly concerned about Thwaites' far-off grounding zone. "We have to confront Mitch McConnell, who calls himself 'the Grim Reaper'," said Castor.

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Even just monitoring Thwaites has become tricky. The old federal planes that flew NYU's Holland and his team around Antarctica are liable to break down, he said, threatening to derail missions.

But Thwaites promises to keep receding, whether or not we're able to watch up close. How fast this happens as the planet continues to relentlessly warm is a question that won't go away, may haunt our descendants, and might taint the legacy of a largely ignorant Congress.

Anandakrishnan has some advice for the taxpayer-salaried members of Congress. "If you don’t know the name 'Thwaites Glacier,' you ought to pay attention to it," he said.