West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier (TG) is believed to be catastrophically melting due to recent regional circumpolar deep water (CDW) warming caused by human activity.
But two new studies indicate:
The TG would continue melting for another 150 years even if the CDW stopped warming or even cooled, as a warming CDW does not drive TG melt (Williams et al., 2026).
A belief that governmental policy choices or atmospheric CO2 concentrations control either deepwater temperatures or TG melt cannot be supported.
Image Source: Williams et al., 2026
A companion study (Damini et al., 2026) quantifies the “significant” regional CDW warming catastrophically melting West Antarctica glaciers amounts to just 0.1°C from the 1990s to 2010s. A -0.1°C cooling trend is also regionally present, offsetting the warming.
These authors do not suggest humans are warming the deepwater around Antarctica by enhancing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, but that warming (and cooling) have been ~100% “driven by wind-forced circulation changes.”
