UC Irvine

Thwaites Glacier is a major contributor to Antarctic mass loss and a key source of uncertainty in future sea-level rise. Ocean-driven melting at its grounding line drives rapid retreat, yet most models treat the transition between grounded and floating ice as a sharp boundary, neglecting kilometer-scale seawater intrusions that develop as the grounding line migrates and forms a grounding zone. Here, we show that actively-melting grounding zones are required to reproduce nearly three decades of observed retreat, thinning, and acceleration of Thwaites Glacier in a calibrated ice-sheet model, with successful reconstruction occurring only when grounding zones are represented as 2-5 km wide regions. Extending this model forward, we show that grounding-zone processes govern glacier's detachment from stabilizing seafloor ridges, enabling unpinning as early as 2038 and producing up to 30 ± 6 mm of global mean sea-level rise by 2100 - approximately double previous projections even without additional climate warming.