{"id":21079,"date":"2024-03-01T03:47:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-29T22:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/?p=21079"},"modified":"2025-04-06T09:41:39","modified_gmt":"2025-04-06T04:11:39","slug":"doomsday-glacier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/doomsday-glacier\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Doomsday Glacier?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>About Doomsday Glacier<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Thwaites Glacier, also known as the \u201cDoomsday Glacier,\u201d is located in the remote\u00a0Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>It\u2019s a\u00a0wide and fast-flowing glacier, roughly the\u00a0size of Florida or Great Britain, and it has been a significant\u00a0focus of scientific study due to its\u00a0sensitivity to climate change.<\/li>\n<li>It is one of the\u00a0most vulnerable and important glaciers in the world in terms of future global sea-level rise.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Satellite measurements have shown that the glacier is\u00a0losing an enormous amount of ice each year, nearly\u00a050 billion tons annually,\u00a0contributing to rising global sea levels. The glacier already\u00a0contributes 4% of global sea level rise.<\/li>\n<li>If the entire Thwaites\u00a0Glacier were to melt, it could\u00a0raise the world\u2019s oceans by about\u00a065 centimeters (over 2 feet).<\/li>\n<li>It\u00a0also acts as a buffer, holding back neighboring glaciers that contain around three meters of potential sea level rise.<\/li>\n<li>A\u00a0critical concern\u00a0is that\u00a0much of Thwaites sits on land that is\u00a0below sea level, in a\u00a0configuration known as \u201cmarine-based.\u201d\n<ul>\n<li>This situation means that as the\u00a0glacier\u2019s grounding line \u2013 the\u00a0point where the\u00a0glacier\u2019s ice lifts off the land and starts floating on the sea \u2013\u00a0retreats inland, it\u00a0can pass over deeper and deeper valleys.<\/li>\n<li>This process\u00a0allows more and more ice to discharge into the sea, which might\u00a0accelerate the glacier\u2019s melt in a phenomenon known as \u201cmarine ice sheet instability.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Q1) What is a Glacier?<\/h3>\n<p>Glaciers are massive bodies of slowly moving ice. Glaciers form on land, and they are made up of fallen snow that gets compressed into ice over many centuries. They move slowly downward from the pull of gravity.Most of the world\u2019s glaciers exist in the polar regions, in areas like Greenland, the Canadian Arctic, and Antarctica.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Source:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wionews.com\/science\/antarcticas-doomsday-glacier-began-retreat-in-1940s-by-el-nino-new-study-694603\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"><u>Antarctica&#8217;s &#8216;Doomsday Glacier&#8217; has been losing ice since 1940s, and El Nino is to blame: Study<\/u><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thwaites Glacier, also known as the \u201cDoomsday Glacier,\u201d is located in the remote Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":21080,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-21079","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upsc-prelims-current-affairs","8":"no-featured-image-padding"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21079\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}