As part of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) IceBridge mission, a flight was made over the Denmar glacier. It was observed that gliding occurred in the glacier. According to new research, it was stated that potentially trillions of ice can slide into the ocean. Denmar glacier is located in the east of Antarctica. The glacier stands out as a layer around an approximately 19 kilometers wide ice river that flows through the canyon in the ice layer before pouring into the ocean and is known as a pit about 3 kilometers deep. “The configuration of the glacier bed makes it one of the weakest spots in East Antarctica,” says Virginia Brancato, a scientist at NASA. If I have to look at Eastern Antarctica as a whole, this is the most vulnerable point in this region. ” There was a slip in the Denmar glacier: Until now, scientific attention has been mostly on the ice sheet of Western Antarctica. Because many glaciers in Western Antarctica are rapidly losing ice, as the major Thwaites glacier, which is the subject of an international research mission of millions of dollars, is cut from under the warm ocean water. However, East Antarctica has the potential to release more ice, and some glaciers may be vulnerable to the same process affecting glaciers in Western Antarctica, which scientists call “sea ice layer instability”. Glacier scientist Helen Amanda Fricker from the Scripps Oceanographic Institute shared the information, “The ice storage in East Antarctica, nine times the Western Antarctic ice sheet”. The Denmar glacier has already lost more than 250 billion tons of ice. The researchers calculated that this loss was equivalent to a little more than half a millimeter of sea level rise. However, if the glacier travels backwards across the entire underground canyon, there is a potential for 540 trillion tons of ice loss. At this point, melting can reach a critical area of Antarctica called Aurora Underground Basin. The Antarctic Ice Sheet is one of the Earth’s two polar ice sheets and covers approximately 98 percent of the Antarctic continent, and also contains 26.5 million cubic meters of ice.
