Essay by Eric Worrall
Alarmists claim a big glacier in Antarctica could “swallow parts of cities all over the world”.
How Australia will be impacted by the ‘doomsday glacier’ that could swallow cities
The collapse of this one glacier could raise sea levels enough to swallow cities all over the world.
Maddison Brennan-Mills
July 16, 2025 – 1:44PM…
There’s a glacier in Antarctica so big and unstable that scientists from The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration call it the “Doomsday Glacier”.
…
Thwaites Glacier is in West Antarctica and is roughly the size of Great Britain. It’s more than 2 kilometres thick in places, which, when melted, is an astonishing amount of water.
Scientists warn that if it fully collapses, it could raise global sea levels by approximately 65 centimetres.
“If Thwaites Glacier collapses it would cause a rise of around 65cm (25 inches) in sea level,” said Dr Alastair Graham of the University of South Florida.
…
A 65 centimetre rise is enough to flood huge areas of low-lying land. Cities like New York, London, and Bangkok would see chronic inundation.
…
Read more: https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/climate-change/how-australia-will-be-impacted-by-the-doomsday-glacier-that-could-swallow-cities/news-story/995bbda2e34fa6d68118af76a8e20c8c
Like all remotely plausible climate crisis, this doomsday scenario relies on people doing absolutely nothing to help themselves, to adapt and rectify issues.
In the Netherlands / Holland, they defeated the sea by building dikes and pumps to protect their fields. Much of Holland would be inundated by sea water long ago if it weren’t for anti-flooding systems which have been in place for centuries.
In the Italian city of Venice, they drove huge wooden pilings into the silt, and used it to create a stable foundation for one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
Some of the most impressive innovations in my opinion occurred in the 19th century United States. Entire cities were raised one floor, like Chicago (see picture at the top of the page) where buildings were jacked up, and Seattle, where streets were simply raised one floor, and what was formerly the street level became an underground tunnel network.
To believe this “Doomsday glacier” is a crisis requires believing people of today couldn’t replicate a feat performed almost two centuries ago by ancestors who mostly used hand tools.
And of course there is China and Singapore. Singapore today is significantly larger than the Singapore of 200 years ago, whenever they run out of realestate they pour a bit of concrete and reclaim large tracts of land from the sea.
Such work is still ongoing, on many different scales. I once lived in house which fronted onto a tidal river. The property title dated back to the time of Robin Hood’s King John around 1200AD, so part of it was underwater. The owner who moved in after I left had the floor raised 3ft, to reduce the risk of flooding. During the coming decades, individual home owners lucky enough to live in such beautiful places will deal with flood risk on their own dime, and local governments will eventually be prodded into raising streets prone to flood damage, or improving drainage and installing flood pumps.
If that glacier collapses, nobody will even notice – all the remedial work will have already been done.
How can anyone take such fake crisis seriously?
Sadly we have a Climategate email which may help answer this question, at least about how some alarmists feel. The author is the “Hide the Decline” former CRU director Dr. Phil Jones.
From: Phil Jones [redacted]
To: John Christy [redacted]
Subject: This and that
Date: Tue Jul 5 15:51:55 2005John,
There has been some email traffic in the last few days to a week – quite a bit really, only a small part about MSU. The main part has been one of your House subcommittees wanting Mike Mann and others and IPCC to respond on how they produced their reconstructions and how IPCC produced their report. In case you want to look at this see later in the email !
Also this load of rubbish !
This is from an Australian at BMRC (not Neville Nicholls). It began from the attached article. What an idiot. The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.
The Australian also alerted me to this blogging ! I think this is the term ! Luckily I don’t live in Australia.
[1]http://mustelid.blogspot.com/2005/06/first-look-at-scs-msu-vn52.html Unlike the UK, the public in Australia is very very naive about climate change, mostly because of our governments Kyoto stance, and because there is a proliferation of people with no climate knowledge at all that are prepared to do the gov bidding. Hence the general populace is at best confused, and at worst, antagonistic about climate change – for instance, at a recent rural meeting on drought, attended by politicians and around 2000 farmers, a Qld collegue – Dr Roger Stone – spoke about drought from a climatologist point of view, and suggested that climate change may be playing a role in Australias continuing drought+water problem. He was booed and heckled (and unfortunately some politicians applauded when this happened) – that’s what we’re dealing with due to columists such as the one I sent to you.
Now to your email. I have seen the latest Mears and Wentz paper (to Science), but am not reviewing it, thank goodness. I am reviewing a couple of papers on extremes, so that I can refer to them in the chapter for AR4. Somewhat circular, but I kept to my usual standards. The Hadley Centre are working on the day/night issue with sondes, but there are a lot of problems as there are very few sites in the tropics with both and where both can be distinguished. My own view if that the sondes are overdoing the cooling wrt MSU4 in the lower stratosphere, and some of this likely (IPCC definition) affects the upper troposphere as well. Sondes are a mess and the fact you get agreement with some of them is miraculous. Have you looked at individual sondes, rather than averages – particularly tropical ones? LKS is good, but the RATPAC update less so. As for being on the latest VG analysis, Kostya wanted it to use the surface data.
I thought the model comparisons were a useful aside, so agreed. Ben sent me a paper he’s submitted with lots of model comparisons that I also thought a useful addition to the subject.
As for resolving all this (as opposed to the dogfight) I’m hoping that CCSP will come up with something – a compromise. I might be naive in this respect. I hope you are still emailing and talking to Carl and Frank. How is CCSP going? Are you still on schedule for end of August for your open review?
What will be interesting is to see how IPCC pans out, as we’ve been told we can’t use any article that hasn’t been submitted by May 31. This date isn’t binding, but Aug 12 is a little more as this is when we must submit our next draft – the one everybody will be able to get access to and comment upon. The science isn’t going to stop from now until AR4 comes out in early 2007, so we are going to have to add in relevant new and important papers. I hope it is up to us to decide what is important and new. So, unless you get something to me soon, it won’t be in this version. It shouldn’t matter though, as it will be ridiculous to keep later drafts without it. We will be open to criticism though with what we do add in subsequent drafts. Someone is going to check the final version and the Aug 12 draft. This is partly why I’ve sent you the rest of this email. IPCC, me and whoever will get accused of being political, whatever we do. As you know, I’m not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.
Cheers
Phil
Source: Partial excerpt Climategate Email 1120593115.txt
Luckily for the rest of us, those who are looking forward to any kind of noticeable climate crisis are doomed to disappointment.
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story tip.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/bhp-turns-to-china-to-kill-diesel/news-story/54be51174f6c8cf660edf0f801fd8c72
Imagine trying to run a mining fleet on batteries? These trucks operate 24 hours a day, excluding maintenance. What are they supposed to do now? One trip into the mine and then 12 hours recharging? Or will it be one trip into the mine then cremation as the fast charging kicks in.
As a bonus, most mine sites in Oz are a long way from a central electricity grid. Does that mean that they will be fast charging these trucks using diesel generators? It just doesn’t seem too smart to add another loss/device into the energy system.
I’m pretty shure unions would dig such kind of mine…all the paid downtime, true paradise on earth lol.
Trolley systems have been used in Kiruna Mine for many years
https://im-mining.com/2021/10/04/underground-electric-haulage-comes-full-circle-epiroc-abb-boliden-announce-battery-trolley-project-kristineberg/
As early as 1950s. And battery rail systems were common underground in the 1960s and 70s.
Electric equipments used underground makes economic sense because it avoids vast amounts of air turnover to maintain a safe, inhabitable underground climate. Waste heat and fumes from diesel engines demand high rates of air replacement.
I also understand that Rio Tinto are in taks with BYD and CALB for batteries to firm solar and wind to supply their smelters. One word describes that -HOPEFUL. How could Australian, Canadian and US smelters running on wind and solar compete with coal fired electricity.
Low tech safe lead acid batteries. This article is about the monster trucks in open cast mining. Different thing all together. It will never work.
It is working – they use very large dump trucks on the Western Australian iron ore minesites, and some are electric.
We are talking about open pit mines here.
If one is going to use coal plants to recharge batteries to power machines to mine coal… there is an obvious unneeded step there.
I believe Fortescue in the Pilbara, Western Australia, already run some EV mine dump trucks – they are made I believe in Japan. Not sure how many or how successful they are.
I would generally agree that most cities will adjust to sea level rise. In the US, however, the large coastal cities are run by incompetent democrats. They will get nothing done on a timely basis.
Atlantis was most likely run (into the seabed) by democrats…they never learn…
Evil hearts, small brains, no one hires them for serious jobs, due to whining, that’s the reason for their DEI, to keep capable people out.
Sea level rise has been slowing and some experts think it has stopped, and might be receding. Tide gauges around the world show very little rise over the last 100 years.
“Tide gauges around the world show very little rise over the last 100 years.”
______________________________________________________________
Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level PSMSL
https://psmsl.org/data/obtaining/
You’re welcome
If Earth’s age is 4 billion years, 100 years is nothing.
And how much should I trust data from 1925 anyway?
They would purposefully block any construction that would solve such a problem (if it were to be anything more than speculation) so that they could bray about how they were ‘right’ on the backs of the suffering of people. Just like Phil Jones, those idiots hope for “proof” to show them to be virtuous in the propagandizing.
They wouldn’t be interested in any actual “solution” that does not involve more money and power in the hands of *them.*
Like NOLA, they’ve probably been spending the levee maintenance funds on hookers and blow.
Well let the sea level rise, since most big cities are populated by virtue signalling ecotards…drowning them ‘naturally” would be a solution. People with brains either seek higher ground or learn to swim.
sarc?
I am with you the world needs less inner city woke idiots and it’s going to hit the right target we just need to work out how to get it to happen faster 🙂
Keep chucking rocks into the sea.
Some of the upgrade work on the freeway between Sydney and Brisbane over the last decade places elevated roads above flood plains. These roads replaced the previous generation that were prone to inundation and damage from floodwater but are now 4 or 5 metres above the flood plain.
The elevated roads are expensive to build but Australia is entirely dependent on interstate road freight for day-to-day needs so flood immune roadways are a valuable asset for the economy.
Uhm… can someone explain to me how a glacier could “collapse”?
Do they think it is hollow? Or maybe there’s a big hole under the two kilometer thick glacier and it will crack in half and slide into the hole? How, exactly, does two kilometers of ice “collapse”. I know what melting is. I also know what collapsing is. The igloos I built in my youth “collapsed” in the spring, but they were hollow. I saw a house collapse once. Also hollow. Balloons more often pop than not, but give them a slow leak and they will collapse. Oops, another example of something hollow.
How, exactly, does a glacier “collapse”?
PS – if it turns out the glacier is hollow, all good, their 65 cm calculation is off by 64.5369 cm (this is climate science, we have to use all the decimal places we can).
The record low temperatures in the Arctic of minus 80 Centigrade should keep it solid.
Good point about the decimal places.
Which prompts another thought –
if all climate reports were legally prohibited from using any decimal points, whole numbers only, not rounded up, would the “climate crisis” suddenly disappear?
In this case, a collapse means that it slides into the seas.
Look out for collapsing sea lions? Otters?
And how many decades will it take to collapse?
Idle question, if a 2km high glacier in Antarctica, which is close to the Earth’s axis, were to melt and raise sea levels all over the world by 65cm. How much would the Earth’s spin slow by? A couple of micro-seconds? A whole milli-second?
Since it is on axis, not speeding up or slowing down.
There would be little or no change in the planet’s angular momentum.
Yes the ice is on axis, but if it melts it will move. Correct answer but that water’s going to shift to the equator… or other water that that water displaces will shift to the equator… or
It is admirable that at least one person knew when to stop. I remember the day a manager walked into my lab and threw one of those take-it-apart farmer puzzles into a ring of engineers and said “help solve this”. Bloodbath.
I did the calculation – situation is similar to a physics book problem where rotation speed changes as the radius af a rotating mass changes as angular momentum is conserved. Trouble is, Earth’s radius is over 6000km and its mass is over 6e24 kg.
(No it’s not spherical but easiest route to solution is to call Earth a sphere and call the ice a point mass)
I converted the result to milers per hour because I’m an ignorant American and… yeah… “There would be little or no change”
FYI:
“The conservation of angular momentum is a principle stating that the total angular momentum of a system remains constant if no external torque acts on it. This means that the rotational motion of an object or system will be maintained unless a force causes it to change its rotation. In simpler terms, an object rotating will keep rotating at the same speed unless something pushes or pulls on it to make it speed up, slow down, or change direction.”
Backed by AI:
“Here’s a more detailed explanation:
Melting Ice and Mass Redistribution:
When ice sheets and glaciers melt, the water flows into the oceans, redistributing mass from the poles towards the equator.
Impact on Earth’s Rotation:
This shift in mass affects Earth’s rotation, causing it to slow down slightly. As the planet spins more slowly, the length of a day increases.
Accelerating Change:
Recent studies indicate that the rate at which days are lengthening due to ice melt has accelerated since the year 2000, coinciding with increased rates of ice loss.
Magnitude of Change:
In the 20th century, the increase in day length attributed to ice melt was between 0.3 and 1 millisecond per century. However, since 2000, this rate has increased to 1.33 milliseconds per century.
Future Projections:
If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, the rate of day length increase could reach 2.62 milliseconds per century by the end of the century, potentially surpassing the influence of the moon on Earth’s rotation.”
I notice the AI has been programmed more to emphasize the effects of AGW than to explain the math. Sad.
And still no AI answer to my nagging question “How many windmills do we have to build before we slow the rotation?”
The way I model the problem, windmills add friction but I’v never figured out how to apply friction to a solid-gas interface. C’mon AI, do the f%$^#&$ thinking for me!
(Then we could quantify which has the biggest Earth-slowing affect: allowing ice radius to remain high, unmelted, or building enough windmills to stop melting – I don’t believe that CO2 melts glaciers in reality, but whatever. I just want to know which is worse in theory.)
Regarding “worse in theory”: If the Earth’s rotation slows then the hot side gets hotter and the cold side gets colder. Much bad weather stuff – eg hurricanes – gets worse due to temperature differentials that cause air masses to move. That’s why I called slower worse. For other reasons it might be better. Would people get shorter? Shorter lighter people tend to have longer lifespans. So much math.
All solid materials have a stress failure point. When the stress exceeds the material strength, a fault line is created. That is what happened to that finger of Antarctic ice that broke off a few years back.
So CO2 is warming the waters around Antarctica sufficiently to melt ice? Hmmm… No.
Some of the ocean floor volcanos could. How much? No one knows.
Another word drained of its practical meaning for the sake of art.
“noun
an instance of a structure falling down or in.
“the collapse of a railroad bridge””
I found reference to ancient arches and modern humans with cardiovascular issues.
I noted “collapse” and also “unstable”.
How many millions of years must a thing persist before it can be called “stable”?
Check this out: nasa-worldview-2025 JAN 16-to-2025 FEB 10 ezgif.gif
There’s a typical physics question for students: One has a glass full of ice water. When the ice
melts does the level rise or not. Answer: it doesn’t.
Yes that was my reaction – if it is FLOATING (sea) ice, it wouldn’t do a thing to sea levels.
The glacier in the reference link is anchored to the seabed with most of the ice already displacing water. There are no measurements, but if 90% is below sea level, there can be no change in sea level as it melts. Ice is ~ 90% the density of water, which is why it floats.
Since it is “anchored” on the sea bed, the only part of it that could possibly contribute to sea level rise would be that portion of the ice above sea level that exceeds the 10%/90% threshold.
Ex. If 85% is subsurface and anchored on the sea floor, then 8.5% is the 10/90 meaning only 15% – 8.5% = 6.5% of the total ice mass will affect the ocean if it all melts.
They claim 25 inches. It seems to me to be more like 1.6 inches.
Here’s a simplistic calculation fo how long it may take for the Thwaites glacier to slide into the sea.
Ignoring the part of Thwaites Glacier now floating it is 190000 square kilometres in area with a front on the ocean of about 75km.Therefore length of glacier is 190000/75 i.e. approximately 1600km. If the glacier started to slide at an average speed of 8km/year then it will take 200 years to slide into the sea. Might be just about enough time to build a city sea wall of 65 cm above the maximum high tide level.
From one of the links –
Do these dimwits not realise that the shelf only exists because of frozen precipitation building up on land to the extent that ice slides downwards due to gravity, and the river of ice flows into the ocean?
Ice being quite brittle, and floating on water, flexes with the tides, eventually breaking off, floating away and melting.
The point is that for this to happen, “sea levels” dropped, owing to the oceans providing the water to make the snow which created the additional ice to make the glacier flow!
Talk of glaciers “collapsing” is just another example of the ignorant and gullible GHE cultists perverting the English language to engender fear and alarm. Rivers of ice may melt or flow. Suddenly falling down or giving way is not a glacial characteristic.
One might just as easily get terrified because the Amazon flows into the ocean. The Amazon is delivering over 200,000 cubic meters per second of fresh water into the ocean. Multiply this by the number of seconds in a year (30,154,000), and you get a fair amount of water flowing into the ocean each year, with no worrying rise in sea levels results resulting in world-wide panic.
The Thwaites glacier loses about 80 cubic km per year – a small fraction of the amount delivered by the Amazon alone.
Panic? Maybe not just yet.
Well done.
This claim, made by news.com.au, is false. The term “doomsday glacier” is not used by the ITGC scientists as they made clear in a press release back in 2021.
They also stated (my emphasis):
It’s amazing how Alarmists like you are capable of predicting events centuries in the future but not those within our lifetimes.
He may be an alarmist in some areas, but in this case he totally debunked the DOOMSDAY aspect of the reporting.
He moved closer to skeptic with this post.
Take a look at the model vrs observations charts some time, Graeme
So basically just ignore it because it’s like worrying about the death of the sun and the universe.
Well done.
How many ‘trusted journalists’ and ‘high standard’ publications published this major fact? All of the Leftist media still calls it the “Doomsday Glacier.”
The media outlet in question does not appear to be particularly ‘leftist’.
It seems to be a pretty common tactic for media outlets of all hues to exaggerate what the scientists are actually saying.
How can anyone take such fake crisis seriously?
It’s pretty easy for creative types-
Straight white author’s career finally takes off after he tells woke publishers he’s gender queer
“I am reviewing a couple of papers on extremes, so that I can refer to them in the chapter for AR4. Somewhat circular, but I kept to my usual standards.”
Peer-review in action.
CV watch: Maddison Brennan-Mills, Bachelor of Communication, Communication and Media Studies
He is clearly over-qualified for climate science.
“They” please.
What kind of a dystopian world would we have if pronouns taxonomies were generally ignored?
I hope you omitted a /sarc in error.
I might have.
But just like confused alternative pronouns adopters, I like to leave my options open 🙂
Clearly.
However he is quite qualified to legerdemain climate apocalypses.
OK, I’ll bite, what is their plan to melt this glacier? It ain’t gonna melt by itself, how they plan to make it happen? Giant space lasers? I know! They are going to put lasers on whales heads! Yea, thats the ticket!
How exactly does a glacier “collapse”?
What, when it flows off the Antarctican continent it instantaneously melts? It already contacts the liquid ocean, so it is not as if there isn’t some degree of melting already – at zero degrees C it simply undergoes a phase transformation at that same temperature until all of it is melted.
And by the way, just how does a glacier move off the land into the water? Does it sprout legs and walk off the land? Hmmm … maybe, just maybe, gravity has something to do with it … such as greater ice accumulation “uphill” (inland) that then, by gravity, moves laterally to the lower elevation (i.e., the lower potential energy). A glacier can’t move with out there being something uphill, or upgradient, moving it. Just like a liquid water river.
So wouldn’t the greater ice accumulation uphill indicate that, I know this is really gobsmacking for the warmunists, the planet is in equilibrium in a closed cycle. More ice accumulates uphill, forcing more ice down hill to the ocean where it eventually melts, but then precipitation continues to pile more and more ice uphill which repeats the cycle.
Also, something never discussed by the warmunists, but when you .. you know … put an ice cube in a drink, it causes the ice to melt … but it also causes the drink to cool down. Cooling the ocean is a certain effect of a huge glacier melting. Cooling an ocean causes it to contract as a matter of well known thermal expansion/contraction. Plus melted icewater has a smaller volume than the ice. All these things of course work in concert and create a sort of equilibrium that lasts thousands of years.
So people aren’t going to wake up tomorrow morning and find the sea level suddenly 65 cm higher.
“And by the way, just how does a glacier move off the land into the water? Does it sprout legs and walk off the land? Hmmm … maybe, just maybe, gravity has something to do with it … such as greater ice accumulation “uphill” (inland) that then, by gravity, moves laterally to the lower elevation (i.e., the lower potential energy). A glacier can’t move with out there being something uphill, or upgradient, moving it. Just like a liquid water river.”
It’s quite straightforward, off the Thwaites there has been a large amount of seaice which resists the flow of the glacier, acting like a dam. That seaice has been melting and breaking up thus reducing the resistance to the down flowing glacier ice which is accelerating its flow into the ocean.
What is the envisioned gain from such an article? Certainly not spurring any real action on this threat, just an over-arching climate solution (with they and their people in charge, no doubt). When nothing comes of this, what do they say?
The author had to inject CO2 and climate apocalypse to get published.
Conclusion from reading comments: A lot of WUWT readers have degrees that required a physics class. From watching the news I’d figured we were a band of buck toothed hillbillies.
So now it’s glaciers that are posing the threat again. It seems to me that this was part of an imminent Ice Age warning in the 1960s, but when that never materialized the alarmists launched into the global warming song-and-dance routine. Now when it’s become obvious that the majority of the global population has ignored this as well, the climate crackpots have revived the widespread glaciation theory, but they should rest assured that it will be met with an even greater degree of skepticism than their earlier warnings.
This is closest weather station to this glacier on the coast and this means it won’t melt at all.
Year/Month Observation Mean Temp.Normal Mean Temp.[degC]
[degC] Max. Temp.(Monthly Mean)[degC] Min. Temp.(Monthly Mean)[degC]
2024-11 -15.9 -12.5 -19.4 -13.4
2024-12 -4.7 -2.3 -6.9 -6.4
2025-01 -7.5 -4.7 -9.8 -7.2
2025-02 -17.5 -13.9 -20.9 -14.4
The warmest maximum monthly temperature was -2.3c in December. This is colder than any month in the coldest winter in the UK, during 1962/63 and that was a deep freeze.
Glaciers don’t collapse – they recede as they melt. The weight of glacier, the rough nature of the ground underneath, and the fact that the glacier is frozen fast to the frozen water in the ground too, means that huge glaciers aren’t just going to slide into the ocean.
Ice shelves, created because it’s cold enough to freeze salt water and have it grow and grow and grow floating on the ocean, break off because there’s too much ice which breaks off and then spends YEARS floating around Antarctica before the currents manage to carry it north, eventually north enough to start melting.
Government Antarctic ice experts are lying to us.