Massive ice shelf on verge of breakup

[Schuyler Colfax]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/03 ... index.html

(CNN) -- An ice shelf about the size of Connecticut is breaking up and "hanging by a thread" from the Antarctic Peninsula because of global warming, the British Antarctic Survey said Tuesday.

"We are in for a lot more events like this," said professor Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Scambos alerted the British Antarctic Survey after he noticed part of the Wilkins ice shelf disintegrating on February 28, when he was looking at NASA satellite images.

Late February marks the end of summer at the South Pole and is the time when such events are most likely, he said.

"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 of the large chunk that broke away on February 28.

The Wilkins ice shelf lost about 6 percent of its surface a decade ago, the British Antarctic Survey said in a statement on its Web site

Another 220 square miles -- including the chunk that Scambos spotted -- had splintered from the ice shelf as of March 8, the group said.

"As of mid-March, only a narrow strip of shelf ice was protecting several thousand kilometers of potential further breakup," the group said.

It put the size of the threatened shelf at about 5,571 square miles, comparable to the state of Connecticut, or about half the area of Scotland.

Once Scambos called the British Antarctic Survey, the group sent an aircraft on a reconnaissance mission to examine the extent of the breakout.

"We flew along the main crack and observed the sheer scale of movement from the breakage," said Jim Eliott, according to the group's Web site.

"Big hefty chunks of ice, the size of small houses, look as though they've been thrown around like rubble -- it's like an explosion," he said.

"Wilkins is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula yet to be threatened," David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey said, according to the Web site.

"I didn't expect to see things happen this quickly. The ice shelf is hanging by a thread -- we'll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be."

Ice shelves are floating ice sheets attached to the coast. Because they are already floating, their collapse does not have any effect on sea levels, according to the Cambridge-based British Antarctic Survey.

Scambos said the ice shelf is not currently on the path of the increasingly popular tourist ships that travel from South America to Antarctica. But some plants and animals may have to adapt to the collapse.

"Wildlife will be impacted, but they are pretty adept at dealing with a topsy-turvy world," he said. "The ecosystem is pretty resilient."

Several ice shelves -- Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and Jones -- have collapsed in the past three decades, the British Antarctic Survey said.

Larsen B, a 1,254-square-mile ice shelf, comparable in size to the U.S. state of Rhode Island, collapsed in 2002, the group said.

Scientists say the western Antarctic peninsula -- the piece of the continent that stretches toward South America -- has warmed more than any other place on Earth over the past 50 years, rising by 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit each decade.

Scambos said the poles will be the leading edge of what's happening in the rest of the world as global warming continues.

"Even though they seem far away, changes in the polar regions could have an impact on both hemispheres, with sea level rise and changes in climate patterns," he said.

News of the Wilkins ice shelf's impending break-up came less than two weeks after the United Nation's Environment Program reported that the world's glaciers are melting away and that they show "record" losses.

"Data from close to 30 reference glaciers in nine mountain ranges indicate that between the years 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 the average rate of melting and thinning more than doubled," the UNEP said on March 16.

The most severe glacial shrinking occurred in Europe, with Norway's Breidalblikkbrea glacier, the UNEP said. That glacier thinned by about 10 feet in 2006, compared with less than a foot the year before, it said.

[fusion]

Crap...
However, I do remember that the Larsen B shelf would have supplied Los Angeles drinking water for five hundred years if tapped correctly.
Another example to throw around...

[Patrick Degan]

Just remember —global warming isn't happening. Rush and the Republikans say so, and anyway it's just a short while until Jeebus comes back.

[The Vortex Empire]

And there are still people who think global climate change is fake.

[aerius]

And there are still people who think global climate change is fake.

The latest whack-a-loony theory making the rounds says it's all because of the solar sunspot cycle. The sun's hotter, because there's more sunspots, or something like that.

[Rye]

But the Antarctic ice sheet is growing! Free Market Expert Thinktank Dot Com told me this was all nonsense! Besides which, they were British, so no doubt they were socialist thieves who set out to reach this conclusion no matter what!

[Shinova]

The latest whack-a-loony theory making the rounds says it's all because of the solar sunspot cycle. The sun's hotter, because there's more sunspots, or something like that.

What gets me the most is that people care so much about WHY it's happening, rather than caring about WHAT to do about it. They want to point fingers rather than actually try to solve the problem.

[Hawkwings]

don't collapsing ice shelves cause super-tsunamis?

[Flagg]

The latest whack-a-loony theory making the rounds says it's all because of the solar sunspot cycle. The sun's hotter, because there's more sunspots, or something like that.

What gets me the most is that people care so much about WHY it's happening, rather than caring about WHAT to do about it. They want to point fingers rather than actually try to solve the problem.

That's because while there is still a question in enough minds as to what is causing it, none of the profit harming solutions necessary to mitigate the damage can be made.

[Surlethe]

But the Antarctic ice sheet is growing!

The Antarctic ice sheet is growing -- which is just what you'd expect if the Earth warmed, causing a general rise in precipitation. It's the ice shelves on the periphery which are most vulnerable to melting, since they're not as protected by cold currents and are subject to milder temperatures than the interior of the continent.

[Broomstick]

Found a picture of the ice shelf in question:

[Admiral Valdemar]

The Times has some good pics from the BAS plane and sat library.

Try and ignore some of the ignorance shown by the illiterate public.