The biggest scientific field project in Antarctica's history found that Thwaites Glacier, one of the continent's largest, is melting far faster than scientists previously thought.

The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration is a five-year, US$50 Million project from US and British researchers to to understand why it is changing so rapidly.  It turns out man-made global warming is attacking the glacier from above and below.

Warmer surfaces temperatures are melting the glacier from above.  But Thwaites Glacier rests above land that itself lies below sea level.  As warmer ocean waters creep in from beneath, they are threatening to seep into pockets beneat the ice cover, causing more melting underneath farther from the ocean itself.

Thwaites Glacier is already the source of four percent of the global sea rise.  There's still enough water locked up in it to raise world sea level by more than half a meter.  It's part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which contains more than three meters of additional potential sea level rise.  This could take a century or more, but it is coming and it is a direct threats to low-lying coastal cities around the world.