Christian Elliott

This month, an international team of scientists has been trying to set up sensors on and around Thwaites Glacier, one of the most unstable in the world. It’s often called Antarctica’s “doomsday glacier” because, if it collapses, it would add two feet of sea-level rise to the world’s oceans. On Thwaites itself, part of the team will try today to drop a fiber-optic cable through a 3,200-foot borehole in the ice, near the glacier’s grounding line, where the ocean is eating away at it from below.

This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.
In 2015, 76 million cubic meters of rock crashed from the rugged cliffs above a southeastern Alaska fjord and into the water below. The landslide sparked a nearly 200-meter-tall wave that roared down the narrow Taan Fiord and out into Icy Bay. No one witnessed the collapse, but a year later, the geologist Bretwood Higman was in the area taking detailed measurements of the tsunami’s effects.