Antarctic ice shelf 'hanging by thread'
PARIS —
New evidence has emerged that a large plate of floating ice shelf attached to Antarctica is breaking up, in a troubling sign of global warming, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Thursday.
Images taken by its Envisat remote-sensing satellite show that Wilkins Ice Shelf is “hanging by its last thread” to Charcot Island, one of the plate’s key anchors to the Antarctic peninsula, ESA said in a press release.
“Since the connection to the island… helps stabilize the ice shelf, it is likely the breakup of the bridge will put the remainder of the ice shelf at risk,” it said.
Wilkins Ice Shelf had been stable for most of the last century, covering around 16,000 square kilometers before it began to retreat in the 1990s.
Since then, several large areas have broken away, and two big breakoffs this year left only a narrow ice bridge about 2.7 kilometers wide to connect the shelf to Charcot and nearby Latady Island.
The latest images, taken by Envisat’s radar, say fractures have now opened up in this bridge and adjacent areas of the plate are disintegrating, creating large icebergs.
Scientists are puzzled and concerned by the event, ESA added.
The Antarctic peninsula—the tongue of land that juts northward from the white continent towards South America—has had one of the highest rates of warming anywhere in the world in recent decades.
But this latest stage of the breakup occurred during the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, when atmospheric temperatures are at their lowest.
One idea is that warmer water from the Southern Ocean is reaching the underside of the ice shelf and thinning it rapidly from underneath.
“Wilkins Ice Shelf is the most recent in a long, and growing, list of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula that are responding to the rapid warming that has occurred in this area over the last fifty years,” researcher David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said.
“Current events are showing that we were being too conservative, when we made the prediction in the early 1990s that Wilkins Ice Shelf would be lost within 30 years. The truth is, it is going more quickly than we guessed.”
In the past three decades, six Antarctic ice shelves have collapsed completely—Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and the Jones Ice Shelf.
AFP
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adaydream
No such thing as "global Warming".
Doesn't george bush have some Nobel Prize laureates and some other scientist with law degrees that go through and delete or tone down every mention of "global warming."
Oh, that's right. 6 years after taking office, he finally believes that global warming exist. After he allowed his buddies to ramp up factories and up grade facilities without reqard to the envirement. < :-)
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smithinjapan
Shhhhh.... don't tell the few remaining bush supporters.... they'll just pretend it's a 'nature' thing as they turn up the air-conditioning to counter the inexplicable heat waves.
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RedMeatKoolAid
"In the past three decades, six Antarctic ice shelves have collapsed completely—Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and the Jones Ice Shelf."
Three decades of Bush climate terror, if I understand the global warming religionists here.
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Sarge
I can't believe how many people actually believe that if we stop driving our SUVs and change our lightbulbs that we can stop Mother Nature from warming up or cooling down the planet...
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smithinjapan
sarge: the funny thing is idiots who believe that drilling in an arctic refuge will reduce costs at the pumps tomorrow! And yet YOU in particular support people who wish to do so for that exact reason.
You're right, if you stop driving your SUV (ie, the chair around your computer on which you single-handedly fight the war on terror) tomorrow it won't make a difference the next day, but I can tell you that if morons who think doing nothing now won't make any difference in the future..... well..... good thing you'll be dead by the time the planet is inhospitable. Just don't give your kids any hope, sarge. Tell them flat out you don't care about them and spit in their faces. When you're dying and they don't want to help you (assuming we're still around), I'm sure they won't listen to the 'It's not my fault!' rants.
Point being, again, doing nothing today won't change July 13th, but it WILL change things in the very near future. Doing SOMETHING now likewise won't change anything on July 13th, but WILL have a positive effect on things to come. It's amazing you can't see the forest for the trees, but since you want to cut them all down to keep things cheaper for a day or two.... well... perhaps not SO amazing.
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SushiSake3
Smithy - another EXCELLENT post.
Keep it up.
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adaydream
RedMeatKoolAid - What george bush did was to take 6 years and allowed practices and even encouraged practices that continued the processes of global warming and even took lawyers to rewrite global warming studies to keep his constiuents pouring crap into the atmosphere.
george bush pushed enviremental damaging. < :-)
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