This study examines how global warming affects the stability of a floating ice tongue.

The study shows how the combination of a warm ocean inflow and a warming atmosphere affects the floating ice tongue of the 79° N-Glacier in northeast Greenland.

The “fast arm” on its western side is a fragile, floating “ice tongue.”

In every scenario, the eastern ice shelf will meet a fate similar to the western ice tongue: its constituent shards will disconnect and drift away.

Although Thwaites’s western ice tongue lost 80 percent of its area in the past 25 years, the eastern shelf shrunk only about 15 percent.