How Ice Sheets Raise Sea Level
In 2026 a British Antarctic Survey modelling study found that Thwaites Glacier would keep losing ice for at least 150 years even if ocean melting beneath it stopped, while neighbouring Pine Island Glacier would recover. To see why, this film explains ice on land: the two great ice sheets and how much sea level they hold, how snow becomes glacier ice, how ice flows by creeping and sliding, how floating ice shelves hold glaciers back like a cork, what happened when Larsen B collapsed, how warm deep water melts the shelves from below, why a bed that deepens inland can make a retreat feed itself, how satellites and tide gauges measure the rising sea, and what the IPCC projects for 2100 and beyond. Stack the ice sheets against a coastline, thaw a glacier's bed, pull out the cork, warm the ocean, tilt the bed and switch the ocean off.
Switch off the ocean
A thought experiment run in computer models.
Two mountains of ice
Floating ice barely matters to sea level. Ice on land does.
Snow into ice
Every ice sheet is built one snowfall at a time.
A river of ice
Solid ice flows, slowly, under its own weight.
The floating cork
Where the ice lifts off the seabed and floats.
Pulling the cork
When an ice shelf vanished, its glaciers sped up.
Warm water from below
A deep current reaches under the shelves.
The wrong-way slope
Why a retreat can feed itself.
The widest glacier
Thwaites, on a bed that deepens inland.
Committed
Two glaciers, the same experiment, different answers.
Measuring the sea
From harbour gauges to radar in orbit.
Centuries, not decades
What the IPCC projects, and what it cannot rule out.
The cork and the slope
Slow ice, long consequences.
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