“If you don’t have water, you’re not going to get very far.” Making sense of that subglacial hydrology is especially important for researchers racing to model particularly precarious regions of ice, like the Thwaites Glacier, a few hundred miles away from Whillans.

Dr Lauren Vargo from Victoria University of Wellington says the retreat that we're seeing is due to the majority of New Zealand’s glaciers losing mass most years over the past decade.

Last month, Milillo and other scientists reported that tidal pumping is forcing the rapid retreat of the grounding lines of other West Antarctica glaciers—Pope, Smith, and Kohler.

Today, only one glacier remains in Venezuela: on the second highest peak, Pico Humboldt.“It’s an era that is [almost] completely finished now,” says Melfo, a particle physicist at the University of the Andes, who has recently been working on projects involving biology and ecology, including research on this last glacier.

Scientists undertaking the annual glacier snowline survey over the South Island later this month are keeping a watchful eye on a lake that has been forming and disappearing at the junction of the Tasman and Hochstetter glaciers.

Researchers operating special ship-mounted sonar gear found a series of 25-mile-wide channels in the seafloor that bring warm water to the base of the Thwaites and Pine Island Glaciers.Together, they revealed massive seafloor channels moving warm water to the base of the glacier.

NIWA climate scientist Dr Andrew Lorrey says that the volume lost from the Brewster Glacier in Mt Aspiring National Park is about equal to the basic drinking water requirements for all New Zealanders for those three years.

To slow the ice melt, the Carlen family, which has managed the grotto since 1988, came up with the idea of covering their portion of the glacier with white fleece blankets to reflect the sunlight.

The fiery orange submarine, which she named Ran after the Norse goddess of the sea, hadn’t yet resurfaced from its first mission in the watery depths around the face of West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier.“She’s a very temperamental lady,” Wåhlin said of the $3.6 million, unmanned submarine, while peering through her binoculars on an overcast March day.

The surface temperature of debris on the glacier was 21.6ᵒC when the photo was taken, while the surface temperatures of the lake and surrounding rock ranged from 3.5ᵒC to 30.2ᵒC [Image: Andrew Lorrey, NIWA].

Drone Scouts, of CourseWu has shot conceptual landscape photography in some of the world's most remote locations—East Java, Patagonia, Chile's Atacama Desert, Norway's Svalbard Archipelago—but this shoot, part of a mini-documentary about Wu's photography done as part of a Coors Light ad campaign, gave him the opportunity to highlight global warming by photographing a fast-receding glacier, one of the last in South America.

But he wanted to know what was going on deep below Thwaites, where its ice met the earth.If the mysterious Thwaites Glacier were to “go bad,” it might change the course of civilization.During that 2008 expedition and another a year later, Anandakrishnan’s team performed the geologic equivalent of an ultrasound on Thwaites.

Safely harnessed into position, NIWA's Dr Andrew Lorrey points an FLIR T640 infrared camera out of the open cabin door towards the Tasman Glacier to gather thermal data on the glacier ice, meltwater and the debris cover.

Lowell Glacier, July 22-26, 2018 NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2018) processed by the European Space Agency.

“It’s not an emergency this year, but I’m very pleased we’re doing it [the project] this decade because we can’t wait too long.”Sam Gyimah, Science Minister, said: “Rising sea levels are a globally important issue which cannot be tackled by one country alone.“The Thwaites Glacier already contributes to rising sea levels and understanding its likely collapse in the coming century is vitally important.”

NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and topographic data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). In 1910, glaciers spanned an area of at least 10 square kilometers (4 square miles) in the mountainous region of northwestern Venezuela.