Are We Breaking Up? Ice Shelf in Antarctica Collapsing

March 27, 2008 9:01 am Nadia Environment, In the News, Issues

Antarctic Ice Shelf About to Break Off

Breaking up is hard to do — unless you are a vast ice shelf suffering from global warming. Around 220 square miles of ice collapsed in Antarctica, leaving a massive ice shelf ready to fall apart.

The ice shelf is 5.282 square miles, which is roughly the size of Connecticut.

Timeline of Ice Breaking Off Antarctic Ice Shelf

Professor Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, says that more of these situations are to come.
The Wilkins ice shelf in Antarctica started to disintegrate nearly a month ago when Scambos told the British Antarctic Survey what he found. “The amazing thing was, we saw it within hours of it beginning, in between the morning and the afternoon pictures of that day,” Scambos said.

The 220 square miles broke off from the shelf on March 8, said the British Survey. From mid-March, the group explained, there has only been a small strip of shelf ice protecting thousands of kilometers of potential breakage.

How Ice Shelves Are Breaking Apart

Ice shelves are thick floating platforms of ice sheets. These sheets are attached to the coast, and because they are floating, they do not affect sea levels. However, this does not mean that it doesn’t endanger the rest of the environment. Wildlife will be affected, even though Scambos says the ecosystem is “pretty resilient.”

David Vaughn of the British Antarctic Survey said Wilkins is the largest threatened ice shelf in the Antarctic Peninsula. “The ice shelf is hanging by a thread,” he said. This collapse comes just two weeks after the U.N. Environment Program said the world’s glaciers are melting at record speeds with major losses.

The Antarctic peninsula has warmed the most over the last half century, more than any other place on the planet. This area, along with the Arctic circle, is where global warming is most noticeable.

Read more on how the Wilkins ice shelf is on the verge of collapse here.

Glacier Photograph Copyright AFP
Copyright 2008 Matty Byloos