On October 12, a Nature Communications study projected Thwaites Glacier could add up to 30 ± 6 mm, about 1.2 inches, of sea-level rise by 2100. On October 15, CNN headlined it with a nickname and an unattributed “aggressively”. CNN’s headline prints “Doomsday Glacier” with no quotation marks and no “so-called”, in the place a name goes. The glacier is Thwaites; CNN’s own text says it is “nicknamed the Doomsday Glacier”. Said often enough, across headlines and years, a label stops reading as a label and starts reading as a fact about the ice. The Daily Mail, louder in every other word, at least kept its quotation marks around ‘Doomsday Glacier’. The second sentence puts ‘aggressively’ in quotation marks and names no speaker. That is the hard word: a temper given to melting ice, where the lead author quoted in CNN’s text speaks of “vigorous melting”. The tell is a doom with no number and no date in the sentence. CNN’s text does carry the study’s figure, up to 1.2 inches by 2100, but after 2-foot and 10-foot collapse scenarios, so the first figures set the scale. The Mail’s “TWICE” is about sea levels; the study’s double is about Thwaites’s own share. The study gives what the headline leaves out: up to 30 ± 6 mm by 2100, a figure its authors call a lower bound because it assumes no added warming; a possible break from a stabilizing seafloor ridge as early as 2038; 65 cm of sea level held in the whole glacier. A separate British Antarctic Survey study calls for preparing, and names no deadline. A number and a year leave a reader something to weigh. A nickname leaves only dread.
