【Watch Friends】

The Watch FriendsBritish research submarine that the internet named "Boaty McBoatface" is headed to Antarctica as part of the largest U.S. scientific collaboration with the U.K. in Antarctica in 70 years.

The project, which will involve more than 100 scientists when it gets started later this year, is aimed at gaining a better understanding of the biggest wild card in sea level rise predictions: the fate of the remote Thwaites Glacier, and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that it helps hold back from the sea.

The autonomous Boaty McBoatface submarine, is designed to gather data underneath the ice and will be a key asset for the research program. (Initially, the Natural Environment Research Council, which put on the 2016 naming campaign, wanted the voting public to name a large, polar research ship, but after the people voted for the name Boaty McBoatface, the organization gave the honor of that name to the sub and went with the more dignified RRS Sir David Attenborough for the ship.)

The Thwaites Glacier has been retreating, and already accounts for about 4 percent of global sea level rise, according to the U.K. Natural Environment Research Council, which is funding the project along with the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Scientists are concerned that the geology of the glacier, and the interaction between its floating ice shelf and the interior land-based ice could force the glacier past a point of no return, and dramatically accelerate sea level rise in the next few decades to centuries.

The research project, dubbed the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, was prompted in part by recent studies that showed that a collapse of the Thwaites Glacier could effectively contribute to an unstoppable melt of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, adding as much as 4 to 15 feet of global sea level rise.

To better understand the glacier's behavior, scientists will break out their high-tech gear: Everything from drills that can penetrate 5,000 feet deep into the ice to autonomous submarines like Boaty and remote sensing aircraft.

Some of the scientists involved in the project will traverse the ice on top of the glacier to collect data on the rocks and sediments the ice rests upon, in order to improve the way computer models simulate the glacier's slide into the sea.

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"For more than a decade, satellites have identified this area as a region of massive ice loss and rapid change," said lead U.S. scientific investigator Ted Scambos, of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, in a statement.

"But there are still many aspects of the ice and ocean that cannot be determined from space. We need to go there, with a robust scientific plan of activity, and learn more about how this area is changing in detail, so we can reduce the uncertainty of what might happen in the future."

The Thwaites Glacier, along with other glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland, is being undermined by relatively warm ocean waters flowing underneath the floating ice shelf. Such shelves act like plugs in a sink, buttressing the land-based ice behind them.

During the past decade or more, warm ocean water driven to the surface by increased winds surrounding Antarctica have destabilized the ice sheet from below, thinning the ice shelves and causing the grounding line, which is where land-based ice meets the ocean and becomes floating ice, to retreat inland.

As the grounding lines have retreated, the Thwaites Glacier and others in the region have slid faster into the ocean and become increasingly unstable.

The topography of West Antarctica means that once melting gets going, it can be difficult to impossible to stop.

Two studies published in 2014 found that the glaciers of West Antarctica, including Thwaites, have already slid into a state of "unstoppable" collapse. Those studies found that the Thwaites Glacier's grounding line rests on a coastal sill about 2,000 feet below sea level, and that as one travels further inland by about 40 miles, the grounding line steepens to more than 4,000 feet below sea level.

West Antarctica's collapse alone could cause sea levels to rise by more than a meter, or 3.4 feet, by 2100, according to a 2016 study in the journal Nature.Other studies project sea level rise of around 10 feet or more, an amount that would doom megacities from New York to Manila, Shanghai, and Dhaka.