Their failure would send that ice to the ocean, pushing sea levels up to 13 feet higher than they are today. The glaciers and ice shelves help hold back a massive ice sheet on land. It’s not time to put the glacier and its ice shelf on death watch like the Larsen C ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula, but it’s ice that researchers plan to monitor closely in the coming years. Since 1992, Pine Island and some of its glacial brethren in West Antarctica have seen the fastest grounding line retreat of any glaciers on the continent.Ĭracks have formed elsewhere on Pine Island Glacier including about six miles inland from the calving front, according to NASA. That’s causing the ice shelf to melt and pushing the grounding line - the point where the ice begins to float - back toward land, creating further instability. The ocean under Pine Island Glacier’s ice shelf has warmed about 1☏ since the 1990s. That the recent rifting and calving could totally be evidence of an ongoing, rapid disintegration of the ice shelf, mostly due to ocean next iceberg is coming! /DTxC7UTesD- Simon Gascoin February 15, 2017 In an email, he said that it’s hard to tie these individual events to climate change, but “many studies have shown that Pine Island Glacier is retreating and thinning. Simon Gascoin, an ice and remote sensing expert at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, noted on Twitter that another crack could be seen just inland from where the iceberg calved off, raising the possibility of another calving event. RELATED Large Iceberg Poised to Break Off From Antarctica Antarctica’s Icy ‘Doorstops’ Thin Rising Seas At Risk East Antarctica is Melting From Above and Below The iceberg was roughly “only” the size of Manhattan, underscoring just how dramatic the other breakups have been. Satellite imagery captured the most recent calving event, which Ohio State glaciologist Ian Howat said “ is the equivalent of an ‘aftershock’” following the July 2015 event. And in January, another iceberg cleaved off the glacier. Scientists subsequently spotted cracks in the glacier on a November 2016 flyover. A massive iceberg roughly 225 square miles in size - or in more familiar terms, 10 times the size of Manhattan - broke off in July 2015. The Pine Island Glacier on the coast of West Antarctica is a case in point. Ice around the continent is disappearing as the air and water heat up and the less dramatic breakdowns are just as important to understanding the fate of the ice and the world’s coastal areas.īefore and after satellite imagery show an iceberg breaking off the calving front of the Pine Island Glacier. ![]() But it isn’t the continent’s only frozen feature changing in a warming world. Man-made global warming has already lifted average global air temperatures by about one degree Celsius since pre-industrial levels.Īntarctica is one of the world’s fastest-warming regions.Follow growing crack in the Larsen C ice shelf is the most dramatic example of change in Antarctica right now. Warming ocean water erodes the underbelly of the ice shelves while rising air temperatures weaken them from above. The calving of ice shelves occurs naturally, though global warming is believed to have accelerated the process. If the glaciers held in check by Larsen C spilt into the Antarctic Ocean, it would lift the global water mark by about 10 centimetres, researchers have said. The ice shelves act as giant brakes, preventing glaciers from flowing directly into the ocean. Several ice shelves have cracked around northern parts of Antarctica in recent years.īy itself, the massive iceberg will not add to sea levels when it melts, but scientists worry about the effects it will have on inland glaciers. Ice shelves are floating masses of ice, hundreds of metres thick, that are fed by slow-flowing glaciers from the land. The Larsen-C rift opening over the last 2 years from #Sentinel1 /MT9d3HAw1M The massive sheet of ice with an area nearly as large as the size of the US state of Delaware had been developing a crack across the Larsen C ice shelf over the past few years. “The calving occurred some time between Monday, July 10 and Wednesday, July 12, when a 5,800-square kilometre section of the ice shelf finally broke away,” Swansea University said in a statement on Wednesday. Satellite images confirmed that the trillion-tonne iceberg had broken away and was adrift at sea. ![]() ![]() One of the biggest icebergs in history has snapped off the West Antarctic ice shelf, according to scientists who have been monitoring a growing crack for months.
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