Astronomers have discovered a “super-Earth,” or a world larger than our planet, orbiting a star about 137 light-years away. A second planet, thought to be the size of Earth, may also be orbiting the same star.

The super-Earth exoplanet, known as TOI-715b, orbits a red dwarf star that is cooler and smaller than our sun. Astronomers spotted the planet using NASA’s TESS, or Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, mission. A study detailing the discovery was published in January in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Researchers have determined that the planet, estimated to be one and a half times as wide as our planet, takes just over 19 Earth days to complete one orbit around its star. The planet is close enough to its star to exist within the habitable zone, or the distance from a star that provides a planet with the right temperature for liquid water to exist on its surface.

The habitable zone is usually calculated based on factors such as the size, temperature and mass of a star as well as the reflectivity of a planet’s surface. But there can be large margins of error associated with these factors, calling into question whether a planet really resides in the habitable zone, said lead study author Dr. Georgina Dransfield, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy in the United Kingdom.

Astronomers believe that TOI-715b exists in a narrow and more optimal region around the star known as the conservative habitable zone, which is less likely to be affected by the margins of error.

“This discovery is exciting as it’s the first super-Earth from TESS to be found within the conservative habitable zone,” Dransfield said. “Additionally, as it’s relatively close by, the system is suitable for further atmospheric investigations.”

TESS, the planet hunter

Since it launched in 2018, TESS has helped astronomers spot planets around relatively nearby stars suitable for follow-up observations with ground- and space-based observatories.

“This is allowing us to get a much clearer picture of the diversity of exoplanetary systems orbiting a broad range of stellar types,” Dransfield said.

Telescopes can pick up on dips in starlight that indicate the planet is passing in front of its star, and those dips in starlight are called transits. TOI-715b is close to its star and has a quick orbit, meaning that the planet passes in front of its star, or transits, frequently. As a result, the exoplanet is an optimal candidate for future observations with the James Webb Space Telescope. The Webb telescope sees the universe in infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye, and can peer inside the atmospheres of planets.

As the planet transits the star, starlight filters through it, allowing Webb to look for evidence of an atmosphere and even determine the planet’s atmospheric composition. And understanding whether planets have atmospheres can reveal more about their ability to be potentially habitable for life.

“We really want to know the planet’s mass with high precision to understand if it’s a true super-Earth or a member of the novel category of ocean worlds,” Dransfield said, referring to moons with global oceans such as Jupiter’s Europa or Saturn’s Enceladus. “This will allow us to really shape our follow-up investigations and learn more about exoplanet demographics as a whole.”

To confirm the existence of the likely Earth-size second planet, researchers need more successful observations of the planet’s transits in different wavelengths of light, Dransfield said.

If the Earth-size planet is confirmed, it will become the smallest planet yet that TESS has found in a habitable zone.

The search for Earth-like planets

Red dwarf stars are the most common stars in our galaxy, and a number of them have been found to host small, rocky worlds, such as the recently discovered TRAPPIST system with its seven planets, located 40 light-years away. Planets that orbit more closely to these smaller, cooler stars could receive enough warmth to be potentially habitable.

But a key question is whether these planets are also close enough to be lashed by stellar flares and radiation, which could erode their atmospheres, evaporate water and limit their ability to be habitable for life.

TOI-715b’s star has only shown a couple of flares within the past two years and isn’t considered active, making it an old star, Dransfield said.

In the future, astronomers hope to have the ability to search for planets around stars more similar to our sun, which will require the ability to block intense starlight to find faint Earth-size planets.

Upcoming missions such as the European Space Agency’s PLATO, or PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars, will carry 26 cameras to study Earth-like planets in habitable zone orbits around sun-like stars. The mission is expected to launch in 2026.

“So far, no telescope has been capable of this, but it should be possible within the next decade,” Dransfield said, referring to PLATO. “This will be one of the most anticipated discoveries, as it will begin to show us how common planets truly similar to Earth really are.”

A man accused of killing his girlfriend in Boston before fleeing to Kenya has escaped from a Nairobi jail, where he was awaiting extradition after his capture last week.

Kevin Kangethe, 42, was being held without bail after officials in the United States filed an extradition request for him to be returned to the US to face a murder charge.

He’s accused of killing his girlfriend, Maggie Mbitu, whose body was found in his SUV in a parking garage at Boston Logan International Airport on November 1, two days after she was reported missing. Mbitu, 31, had slash wounds on her face and neck, Massachusetts State Police said.

Authorities searched for Kangethe for three months before he was arrested January 29, when an undercover officer spotted him at a nightclub in Nairobi.

On Wednesday evening local time, a man claiming to be Kangethe’s attorney appeared at the law enforcement complex where he was being held and asked to speak to him, Kenyan authorities said in a statement. They were given a private room in which to talk, and Kangethe took off shortly afterward, police said.

Police said Kangethe slipped out of the police station and boarded a matutu, or public transportation bus, according to Nation, an African news outlet.

At the time of his escape, the station’s commander was in a meeting with the anti-crime unit in her office, police said.

“She was alerted by a loud noise of officers who were chasing the prisoner along Thika Super Highway but they did not manage to rearrest him,” the statement said, referring to a busy eight-lane freeway bustling with cars in the capital.

The man who claimed to be Kangethe’s attorney has been detained, along with four officers at the station, police said.

He was arrested 3 months after he boarded a flight from Boston

Within hours, authorities identified him as the Boston-area fugitive who US investigators said boarded a plane to Kenya shortly after killing his girlfriend. Authorities in Massachusetts had obtained a warrant for his arrest on a murder charge.

Kangethe arrived in Kenya last fall through Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, the nation’s director of public prosecutions said in a statement. He went into hiding in the city’s suburbs but stayed in touch via phone with his friends and relatives, including those in the United States, the statement said.

Kenya has an extradition treaty with the United States. The nation’s director of public prosecutions said Kenya has received a formal extradition request from the US and determined there’s “sufficient evidence” against him.

Mbitu lived in a Boston suburb and was the youngest in a family of health care workers. Her two older sisters and her mother are all nurses.

She was reported missing in late October after she didn’t show up for work. Her family notified the police and called nearby hospitals to check if she was a patient. The next evening, police made a gruesome discovery: her bloodied body, in the SUV inside a parking garage at the airport.

In a criminal complaint from the Massachusetts State Police, authorities say they “were led to Mbitu’s boyfriend” after she went missing.

The day before her body was found, Kangethe boarded flights from Boston to Kenya. Surveillance footage showed him leaving the parking garage and entering an airport terminal, police said.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has announced the dismissal of Ukraine’s top commander, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, in the biggest military shakeup since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion almost two years ago.

The president’s move follows tensions between Zelensky and his hugely popular military chief after the failure of Ukraine’s much-vaunted counteroffensive, and with Ukraine facing a renewed Russian onslaught, manpower and ammunition shortages, and US aid stalled in Congress.

In a Telegram post sent shortly before the formal announcement, Zelensky said he held a meeting with Zaluzhnyi, and “discussed what kind of renewal the Armed Forces of Ukraine need.”

“The time for such a renewal is now,” Zelensky wrote.

Zaluzhnyi’s replacement will be Oleksandr Syrskyi, who since 2019 has served as the Commander of Ukrainian Land Forces.

Zaluzhnyi wrote on his Telegram channel on Thursday that “the tasks of 2022 are different from those of 2024.

“Therefore, everyone must change and adapt to the new realities as well. [We] have just met with the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. It was an important and serious conversation. It was decided that we need to change our approaches and strategy.”

Zaluzhnyi – who had been appointed army chief by Zelensky in July 2021 – was offered a new position by the president, which he turned down, according to one of the sources. It remains unclear whether Zaluzhnyi has decided to remain involved with the military in some capacity.

Differences between the two men had been simmering for many months but appeared to grow wider towards the end of last year, after Zaluzhnyi said the war had reached a stalemate in a long essay and interview in The Economist magazine in November.

Writing after Ukraine’s counteroffensive was mostly rebuffed by heavily fortified Russian defenses, he warned that without a great technological leap forward “there will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough,” but instead an equilibrium of devastating losses and destruction.

His remarks drew immediate criticism from Zelensky’s office, which said such commentary about the war only benefitted Russia.

More recently, the two leaders clashed over whether Ukraine needed a mass mobilization effort. The army chief had suggested up to half a million draftees were required, which Zelensky resisted.

The president told a press conference in December mobilization was a ‘highly sensitive’ issue and that he wanted to hear more arguments in favor before he felt fully ready to back the move.

“This is a very serious number,” Zelensky said. “It is a question about people, about justice, about defense capabilities. It is also a financial question.”

A political gamble for Zelensky

When Russia launched its invasion in February 2022, many of Ukraine’s allies feared Kyiv would fall in just a few days and the rest of the country within weeks. But Ukraine’s troops, under Zaluzhnyi’s direction, were able to drive Moscow’s forces from the capital and later in the year managed to reclaim large parts of the southern and eastern territories occupied by Russia in the early weeks of the war.

Ukraine had hoped to drive Moscow’s forces back further in 2023 but battlefield success proved elusive.

Launched last June, Ukraine’s counteroffensive in particular aimed to push south towards the Sea of Azov, splitting Russia’s forces in two and cutting its land bridge to Crimea.

But Ukraine’s gains were modest. Its forces attempted to advance from Orikhiv towards Tokmak, but only made it as far as Robotyne, a little over 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) south. Russia still occupies around a fifth of Ukraine’s territory.

Since then, Ukraine has been put back on a defensive footing by a flurry of Russian offensives along much of the frontlines, with intense fighting reported in northeastern Kharkiv region and in Zaporizhzhia in the south. Russia has also renewed its aerial assaults on cities across the country, and Ukraine has warned that its air defenses risk being overwhelmed.

Zaluzhnyi’s firing is a political gamble for Zelensky. Despite the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, the now-former military chief remains one of the most popular leaders in the country. A poll by the Kyiv Institute of Sociology found 88% of Ukrainians supported the general. Zelensky’s approval rating, though also high, was markedly lower at 62%.

Analysts have long speculated about whether Zaluzhnyi could one day emerge as a political rival to Zelensky in future elections, although the general has shown scant political ambition so far.

At the same time, Zaluzhnyi warned Ukraine was now having to “contend with a reduction in military support from key allies” as they have become ensnarled by their own political tensions and distracted by conflicts elsewhere.

He said the best way for Ukraine’s army to avoid being drawn into a “positional war,” in which fighting is conducted along permanent and fortified frontlines, is for Ukraine to “master” unmanned weapons systems – or drones – which Zaluzhnyi called the “central driver of this war.”

He will now be replaced by the 59-year-old Syrskyi, who began his soldiering career during the last years of the Soviet Union, training in Moscow.

With Ukraine’s independence in 1991, he rose through the ranks of the Ukrainian armed forces becoming a Major General in 2009. He played a prominent role in Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invaders in the eastern Donbas region in 2014 and 2015.

Two years later he became the commander of all Ukrainian forces involved in the Anti-Terrorist Operation, as the conflict with Russia in eastern Ukraine became known.

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Syrskyi led the defense of Kyiv, and then later that year commanded the successful counteroffensive in the region of Kharkiv, which saw Russian forces driven out of hundreds of settlements.

Another, a frontline commander, also serving in Ukraine’s east, was more critical of the appointment.

Scientists and engineers near the English city of Oxford have set a nuclear fusion energy record, they announced Thursday, bringing the clean, futuristic power source another step closer to reality.

Using the Joint European Torus (JET) — a huge, donut-shaped machine known as a tokamak — the scientists sustained a record 69 megajoules of fusion energy for five seconds, using just 0.2 milligrams of fuel. That’s enough to power roughly 12,000 households for the same amount of time.

Nuclear fusion is the same process that powers the sun and other stars, and is widely seen as the holy grail of clean energy. Experts have worked for decades to master the highly complex process on Earth, and if they do, fusion could generate enormous amounts of energy with tiny inputs of fuel and emit zero planet-warming carbon in the process.

The scientists fed the tokamak deuterium and tritium, which are hydrogen variants that future commercial fusion plants are most likely to use.

To generate fusion energy, the team raised temperatures in the machine to 150 million degrees Celsius — around 10 times hotter than the core of the sun. That extreme heat forces the deuterium and tritium to fuse together and form helium, a process that in turn releases enormous amounts of heat.

The tokamak is lined with strong magnets that hold the plasma in. The heat is then harnessed and used to produce electricity.

The experiment is the last of its kind for JET, which has operated for more than 40 years. Its last experiment — and new record — is promising news for newer fusion projects, said Ambrogio Fasoli, CEO of EUROfusion, the consortium of 300 experts behind the experiment. He pointed to ITER, the world’s biggest tokamak being built in southern France, and DEMO, a machine planned to follow ITER with the aim of producing a higher amount of energy, like a fusion plant prototype.

“Our successful demonstration of operational scenarios for future fusion machines like ITER and DEMO, validated by the new energy record, instil greater confidence in the development of fusion energy,” Fasoli said in a statement.

While fusion energy would be a gamechanger for the climate crisis — which is caused primarily by humans burning fossil fuels — it’s a technology that’s still likely to need many years to commericialize. By the time it’s fully developed, it would be too late to use it as a main tool to address climate change, according to Aneeqa Khan, research fellow in nuclear fusion at the University of Manchester.

And myriad challenges remain. Khan points out that the team used more energy to carry out the experiment than it generated, for example.

“This is a great scientific result, but we are still a way off commercial fusion. Building a fusion power plant also has many engineering and materials challenges,” she said. “However, investment in fusion is growing and we are making real progress. We need to be training up a huge number of people with the skills to work in the field and I hope the technology will be used in the latter half of the century.”

The record was announced the same day that the European Union’s climate and weather monitoring service, Copernicus, confirmed that the world has breached a global warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius over a 12-month period for the first time.

Scientists are more concerned with longer-term warming over that threshold, but it is a symbolic reminder that the world is hurtling toward a level of climate change that it will struggle to adapt to.

Climate science shows that the world must nearly halve its greenhouse gas emissions this decade and reach zero net emissions by 2050 to keep global warming from spiraling to catastrophic levels. That means making a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, like coal, oil and gas.

This story has been updated with additional information.

At least 30 people were killed and another 40 injured in two different explosions in Balochistan province on Wednesday, a day before Pakistan’s general elections.

The blasts took place in the Killa Saifullah district outside an election office belonging to Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) and in the Pishin district near the office of an independent candidate.

The explosion hit 170 kilometers away from Quetta, where JUI candidates Maulana Samiul Haq and Maulana Abdul Wasay are contesting elections.

According to police, a large number of workers were in the office at the time of the explosion.

Shortly before, a separate explosion near the office of Asfand Yar Kakar, an independent candidate in the Pishin district, killed 18 people and injured 23, according to Deputy Commissioner Pishin Jumma Dad Mandokhail.

Those injured in the Pishin blast have been taken to hospital, Medical Superintendent Tehsil Headquarters Hospital Dr. Habib Ur Rehman said.

Initial reports suggested the explosives were planted on a motorcycle.

The blasts come amid rising tensions in Pakistan ahead of Thursday’s election. Violence has escalated across the country as candidates have been shot and killed while campaigning.

On Tuesday, Liz Throssell, spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), said there had been at least 24 reported instances of staged attacks by armed groups against members of political parties.

The Islamic State Pakistan Province (ISPP) claimed responsibility for the blasts in Balochistan, releasing a statement on the ISIS-affiliated news agency Amaq that said it had killed and wounded “about 35 apostates.”

The Balochistan provincial government has announced three days of mourning.

This is a developing story and will be updated

Nicaragua said Wednesday it had granted political asylum to former Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli days after Panama’s top court rejected an appeal to annul his prison sentence in a money laundering case.

According to a diplomatic note that Nicaragua’s government sent to Panama’s foreign ministry, Martinelli requested asylum because he “considered himself persecuted for political reasons and thinks that his life, physical integrity and safety are at imminent risk.”

Last July, Martinelli was sentenced to 10 years and six months in prison and ordered to pay a fine of more than $19.2 million after he was declared guilty, along with four other people, of money laundering in a case known as “New Business.”

The case is related to a publishing group that, according to the public ministry, was purchased with funds that came from state contracts that were handled irregularly. Martinelli declared in court that he was innocent and a victim of political persecution.

Despite the conviction, the former president did not go to jail and was even allowed to register as a presidential candidate in the current race.

Last week, Panama’s Supreme Court rejected an appeal in the “New Business” case, which left Martinelli’s prior conviction in place and disqualified him from running as a presidential candidate.

This is a developing story and will be updated

Nicaragua said Wednesday it had granted political asylum to former Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli days after Panama’s top court rejected an appeal to annul his prison sentence in a money laundering case.

According to a diplomatic note that Nicaragua’s government sent to Panama’s foreign ministry, Martinelli requested asylum because he “considered himself persecuted for political reasons and thinks that his life, physical integrity and safety are at imminent risk.”

Last July, Martinelli was sentenced to 10 years and six months in prison and ordered to pay a fine of more than $19.2 million after he was declared guilty, along with four other people, of money laundering in a case known as “New Business.”

The case is related to a publishing group that, according to the public ministry, was purchased with funds that came from state contracts that were handled irregularly. Martinelli declared in court that he was innocent and a victim of political persecution.

Despite the conviction, the former president did not go to jail and was even allowed to register as a presidential candidate in the current race.

Last week, Panama’s Supreme Court rejected an appeal in the “New Business” case, which left Martinelli’s prior conviction in place and disqualified him from running as a presidential candidate.

This is a developing story and will be updated

A volcano in Iceland erupted on Thursday for the second time this year, pumping lava up to 80 metres (260 feet) into the air in what is the sixth outbreak on the southwestern Reykjanes peninsula since 2021.

Live video from the area showed fountains of bright-orange molten rock spewing from fissures in the ground, in sharp contrast to the still-dark night sky.

“Warning: A volcanic eruption started north of Sylingarfell,” the country’s meteorological office said on its website.

Intense earthquake activity began around 5:30 a.m. and the outbreak itself started some 30 minutes later, it added.

The eruptive fissure was roughly 3 km (2 miles) long, the Met Office said, adding that the outbreak was believed to be in the same location as a Dec. 18 eruption.

The nearby geothermal spa Blue Lagoon had closed on Thursday, it said.

The previous eruption in the area started on Jan. 14 and lasted roughly two days, with lava flows reaching the outskirts of the Grindavik fishing town, whose nearly 4,000 inhabitants had been evacuated, setting some houses alight.

Thursday’s eruption took place some way from Grindavik and was unlikely to pose a direct threat to the town, Icelandic geophysicist Ari Trausti Gudmundsson told Reuters.

“But it could pose some threat to the road to Grindavik and it could pose some threat to the power plant and even to the Blue Lagoon,” he said, adding that the risk depended on how much lava ultimately flowed from the ground.

The Reykjanes outbreaks are so-called fissure eruptions which are often referred to as Icelandic-type. They do not usually result in large explosions or significant production of ash dispersed into the stratosphere.

Reykjavik’s international Keflavik airport was open and operating “in the usual way”, airport operator Isavia said on its website.

Icelandic authorities in November started building dykes that can help divert burning lava flows away from homes and critical infrastructure.

Despite downgrading the volcanic system’s threat level, the local authorities have warned of further eruptions as land continued to rise in the area due to magma accumulating underground.

Iceland, which is roughly the size of the U.S. state of Kentucky, boasts more than 30 active volcanoes, making the north European island a prime destination for volcano tourism – a niche segment that attracts thousands of thrill seekers.

Pakistani authorities shut mobile internet services across the country as millions headed to the polls on Thursday for an election in which old dynasties are vying for power while the country’s widely popular former leader languishes behind bars and militants ramp up deadly attacks.

The much-anticipated vote, already delayed for months, comes as the country of 220 million faces mounting challenges – from economic uncertainty and frequent militant attacks, to climate catastrophes that are putting its most vulnerable at risk.

In a vivid illustration of the surging political violence in the run up to the vote, 30 people were killed in twin blasts targeting campaign offices in the country’s restive Balochistan province on Wednesday, which the Islamic State Pakistan Province militant group claimed responsibility for.

On Thursday, another blast in the region killed two security personnel and injured seven more people at a polling station.

And Mohsin Dawar, a former member of the Pakistani National Assembly, said Taliban militants had taken over polling stations in the country’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

“Militants have been issuing threats to the locals and to the polling staff,” he wrote in a letter to the Election Commission of Pakistan Thursday, adding that three female polling agents “very narrowly escaped attacks” in a polling station.

Pakistan’s Interior Ministry said Thursday it had decided to temporarily suspend mobile internet services nationwide.

“As a result of the recent incidents of terrorism in the country, precious lives have been lost, security measures are essential to maintain the law and order situation and deal with possible threats,” a statement from the ministry said.

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, chair of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and one of the candidates for prime minister, said he has asked his party to approach the country’s Election Commission and the courts over the restrictions.

“Mobile phone services must be restored immediately,” he wrote on social media platform X.

Some activists accused the authorities of censorship, saying the internet suspension was “political in nature” and not “mandated by the court.”

“Access to the internet during elections is critical as evidence of instances of rigging can be reported live by citizens on social media, and journalists can report live,” said Usama Khilji, a digital rights activist from Islamabad.

“Not having internet access can create a sense of panic for voters, and discourage some from going to vote, especially women voters for whom mobility is already an impediment.”

Pakistan will also temporarily close its border crossings with Iran and Afghanistan as a security measure, according to Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch.

Elsewhere, political tensions are running high amid accusations of interference by the military, which it denies.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Volker Türk, urged authorities to ensure a “fully free and fair vote” in a statement Tuesday.

“Elections are an important moment to reaffirm the country’s commitment to human rights and democracy, and to ensure the right to participation of all its people, including women and minorities,” OHCHR spokesperson Liz Throssell added.

Analysts have described the vote as the least credible in the country’s post-independence history, accusing authorities of “pre-poll rigging” amid a wide crackdown on popular former leader Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party.

Cricket icon Khan, 71, who was ousted from power in a storm of controversy, remains imprisoned on multiple convictions and banned from contesting the vote against his rivals. The PTI has been prohibited from using its famous cricket bat symbol on ballots, dealing a blow to millions of illiterate people who might use it to cast their vote, and television stations are banned from running Khan’s speeches.

His longtime foe, veteran politician Nawaz Sharif, 74, a scion of the elite Sharif political dynasty, is seeking a historic fourth term as leader in what would be a remarkable political comeback following years of self-exile overseas after he was sentenced to prison on corruption charges.

Sharif remains widely popular in Pakistan’s Punjab province – the country’s most populous and a key electoral battleground – where his Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) party has been lauded for advancing mega infrastructural projects.

Standing against him is Bhutto Zardari, the 35-year-old son of slain former leader Benazir Bhutto, seeking to reestablish his Pakistan People’s Party as a major political force.

Evidence from a 2,000-foot-long ice core reveals that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet shrank suddenly and dramatically around 8,000 years ago, according to new research — providing an alarming insight into how quickly Antarctic ice could melt and send sea levels soaring.

Part of the ice sheet thinned by 450 meters (1,476 feet) — a height greater than the Empire State Building — over a period of just 200 years at the end of the last Ice Age, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

It’s the first direct evidence that shows such a rapid loss of ice anywhere in Antarctica, according to the study’s authors.

While scientists knew the ice sheet was bigger at the end of the last Ice Age than today, much less was known about when exactly that shrinking happened, said Eric Wolff, a glaciologist at the University of Cambridge in the UK and a study author.

Now it’s clear the ice sheet retreated and thinned very rapidly in the past, Wolff said, the danger is that it could begin again. “If it does start to retreat, it really will do it very fast,” he added.

That could have catastrophic consequences for global sea level rise. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet holds enough water to raise sea levels by about 5 meters – more than 16 feet — which would cause devastating flooding in coastal towns and cities around the world.

The study is “an excellent piece of detective work” about a major part of the Antarctic ice sheet, said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Ice cores are historical archives of the Earth’s atmosphere. Made up of layers of ice that formed as snow fell and compacted over thousands of years, they contain bubbles of ancient air as well as contaminants that provide a record of environmental changes over millennia.

The ice core analyzed in the study was drilled from Skytrain Ice Rise located at the edge of the ice sheet, near the point where the ice starts to float and become part of the Ronne Ice Shelf.

Scientists extracted it in 2019, in a painstaking process that involved drilling constantly for 40 days, pulling up a thin cylinder of ice a few feet at a time. They then cut the core into sections, packed them in insulated boxes kept at minus 20 degrees Celsius, and sent them to the UK via plane then ship.

Once in the UK, the scientists measured the ice core’s water isotopes, which provide information on temperature in the past. Warmer temperatures indicate lower-lying ice — think of it like a mountain, Wolff said, the higher up you go the colder it gets.

They also measured the pressure of trapped air bubbles in the ice. Lower-lying and thinner ice contains higher pressure air bubbles.

It was a surprise when the data revealed just how quickly the ice had thinned at the end of the last Ice Age, Wolff said. “We actually spent a lot of time checking that we hadn’t made a mistake with the analysis.”

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is particularly vulnerable to climate change, because the land under it is below sea level and slopes downward. When warm water gets underneath, it can melt very fast. “It can have a runaway process, and that’s evidently what happened 8,000 years ago,” Wolff said.

The crucial thing “is not to test it too far,” Wolff said, and that means tackling climate change. “We can avoid these tipping points still,” he said.

The new data will help improve the accuracy of the models scientists use to predict how the ice sheet will respond to future global heating, the report says.

David Thornalley, an ocean and climate scientist at University College London, said the study’s data was “striking.” He cautioned that as the study looked at a period 8,000 years ago, when climate conditions were different, the results aren’t a direct example of what could happen today. But, he added, they are still able to offer an “insight into the way that ice sheets can collapse.”

The study comes as scientists continue to sound the alarm about what is happening to the Earth’s most isolated continent.

For example, the Thwaites Glacier, also in West Antarctica, is melting rapidly. A 2022 study said the Thwaites — dubbed the Doomsday Glacier for the catastrophic impact its collapse would have on sea level rise — was hanging on “by its fingernails” as the planet warms.

This new study adds to these concerns, Scambos said. “(It) shows that the very same processes we are seeing, just beginning now in areas like Thwaites Glacier, have played out before in similar areas of Antarctica and indeed, the pace of ice loss was equal to our worst fears about a runaway ice loss.”