NASA’s IceBridge mission flew over the Denman Glacier region, in East Antarctica, on Oct. 30, 2019. The glacier is creeping down a slope that plunges into extreme depths, new research finds, potentially igniting a feedback process that could unload trillions of tons of ice into the ocean. (Operation IceBridge/NASA) Scientists have found a new point of major vulnerability in the Antarctic ice sheet, in a region that already appears to be changing as the climate warms and has the potential to raise sea levels by nearly five feet over the long term. Denman glacier, in East Antarctica, is a 12-mile-wide stream of ice that flows over the deepest undersea canyon in the entire ice sheet before spilling out into the ocean. That subsea trough is more than 2 miles deep, or double the average depth of the Grand Canyon. While there are far deeper trenches in the open ocean, […]