The key to the future of Thwaites is the ice shelf and its tongue.

As he spoke, a red helicopter landed to evacuate one of his eight-member team the ship because of a sprained ankle, which Holland said isn’t too serious. While parts of Thwaites’ edges have fast-spreading cracks like a car windshield, safety mountaineers inspected where researchers set up camp on Dotson, and Holland isn’t worried much about danger. And that's ironic - and troublesome for researchers - because overall Antarctic sea ice is unusually low for this time of year, Larter said. Much of the problem is that loads of sea ice have gravitated around the huge iceberg. It measures about 43 miles by 28 miles (70 kilometers by 44 kilometers), almost the size of Rhode Island, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. This iceberg used to be the tongue or leading edge of Thwaites until it broke off about 20 years ago, Larter said. Thwaites is spawning more icebergs as it's falling apart, Holland said. “Nobody can get to Thwaites this year,” Holland told The Associated Press Monday. And it will all be gone and replaced by the Pacific Ocean in due course.” He called Dotson’s ice shelf “this beautiful white desert-like landscape, brilliantly white actually. The ice shelf “is the most important part of Thwaites and it’s protecting itself and hiding from us,” Holland said in a first video interview from the Dotson ice shelf. The smaller Dotson ice shelf is about 87 miles (140 kilometers) west of the Thwaites ice shelf. He’s hoping that along that blinding white ice and its rugged frozen cliffs he can learn about the unseen warm ocean water nibbling away at both Dotson and Thwaites from below. Improvising, Holland decamped at the nearby Dotson ice shelf to do his research where no human had been before. New York University environmental scientist David Holland, who planned to drill deep through the Thwaites ice shelf to measure the water's warmth below it, is achingly close but not quite there. This was the last of three international scientific expeditions aimed at the vulnerable ice shelf, said British Antarctic Survey geophysicist Rob Larter, chief scientist of the first research mission. Plans to examine the glacier's crucial ice shelf haven't been stopped but are sidetracked a bit, officials said. Scientists from around the world are part of a multi-year $50 million international effort to study the Florida-sized glacier by land, sea and below for the brief time the remote ice is reachable during the Antarctic summer. (AP) - Antarctica’s so-called Doomsday Glacier, nicknamed because it is huge and coming apart, is mostly thwarting an international effort to figure out how dangerously vulnerable it is.Ī large iceberg broke off the deteriorating Thwaites glacier and, along with sea ice, it is blocking two research ships with dozens of scientists from examining how fast its crucial ice shelf is falling apart.

Doomsday glacier