New York-sized ice shelf collapses off Antarctica
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Independent Minds
An area of an Antarctic ice shelf almost the size of New York City has broken into icebergs this month after the collapse of an ice bridge widely blamed on global warming, a scientist said today.
"The northern ice front of the Wilkins Ice Shelf has become unstable and the first icebergs have been released," Angelika Humbert, glaciologist at the University of Muenster in Germany, said of European Space Agency satellite images of the shelf.
Humbert told Reuters about 700 sq km of ice - bigger than Singapore or Bahrain and almost the size of New York - has broken off the Wilkins this month and shattered into a mass of icebergs.
She said 370 sq kms of ice had cracked up in recent days from the Shelf, the latest of about 10 shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula to retreat in a trend linked by the UN Climate Panel to global warming.
The new icebergs added to 330 sq kms of ice that broke up earlier this month with the shattering of an ice bridge apparently pinning the Wilkins in place between Charcot island and the Antarctic Peninsula.
Nine other shelves - ice floating on the sea and linked to the coast - have receded or collapsed around the Antarctic peninsula in the past 50 years, often abruptly like the Larsen A in 1995 or the Larsen B in 2002.
The trend is widely blamed on climate change caused by heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels, according to David Vaughan, a British Antarctic Survey scientist who landed by plane on the Wilkins ice bridge with two Reuters reporters in January.
Humbert said by telephone her estimates were that the Wilkins could lose a total of 800 to 3,000 sq kms of area after the ice bridge shattered.
The Wilkins shelf has already shrunk by about a third from its original 16,000 sq kms when first spotted decades ago, its ice so thick would take at least hundreds of years to form.
Temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula have warmed by up to 3 Celsius this century, Vaughan said, a trend climate scientists blame on global warming from burning fossil fuels in cars, factories and power plants.
The loss of ice shelves does not raise sea levels significantly because the ice is floating and already mostly submerged by the ocean.
But the big worry is that their loss will allow ice sheets on land to move faster, adding extra water to the seas.
Wilkins has almost no pent-up glaciers behind it, but ice shelves further south hold back vast volumes of ice.
The Arctic Council, grouping nations with territory in the Arctic, is due to meet in Tromsoe, north Norway, today to debate the impact of melting ice in the north.
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Comments
'Cause after all, C02 levels rise AFTER temperature, not before.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/17/t
Sea Ice anomaly in Antarctica is well over 1 million sq km ABOVE the 30 year average. Do you hear the MSM shouting about that. No of course not.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosp
As an AG Warmist you may struggle to understand the graph but to me it's quite clear - it's much colder than usual down there even though CO2 continues to rise.
As for the science on Antartica, its a complex picture, but please talk to an expert for an opinion instead of reading blogged denialist hyperbole.
I began on the, 'its not really that serious' side of the fence, then i read, read some more then added to that knowledge with a little more reading and i don't take people word for anything, unless they are a published scientist, now i realize the true extent of the problem.
Dr. Serrez gleefully predicted and ice free North Pole last year. Guess what it never happened.
Where in my comment did I say anything about what I want you to believe. I don't particularly care what you believe. I was just pointing out that your comment about Mark Serreze was wrong. Please grow up.
Fact 2: Ice shelfs naturally calf at this time of year, that is how icebergs are produced.
Fact 3: This loss of ice amounts to 0.01% of the total ice extent.
Fact 4: The Antarctic normally loses 85% of it's sea ice every summer.
Fact 5: This article is just more Yellow Journalism.
From "Responses by Andrew Glikson to Andrew Bolt?s article ?10 climate myths? (Herald Sun 29-4-09)"
MYTH 2 -- THE POLAR CAPS ARE MELTING:
BOLT: Wrong. The British Antarctic Survey, working with NASA, last week confirmed ice around Antarctica has grown 100,000 sq km each decade for the past 30 years. Long-term monitoring by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports the same: southern hemisphere ice has been expanding for decades. As for the Arctic, wrong again. The Arctic ice cap shrank badly two summers ago after years of steady decline, but has since largely recovered. Satellite data from NASA?s Marshall Space Flight Centre this week shows the Arctic hasn?t had this much April ice for at least seven years. Norway?s Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre says the ice is now within the standard deviation range for 1979 to 2007.
GLIKSON: This claim is inconsistent with the numerous reports by NASA and the National Ice and Snow Data Centre ( NSIDC) regarding the Arctic Sea ice, Greenland and West Antarctica (References: here; here; here; here), while the entire Antarctic ice sheet (east and west) has warmed over the last 50 years by 0.12 degrees C per decade and west Antarctica by 0.17 degrees C per-decade, including major polar warming anomalies where mean temperature rises over the last 10 years reached levels 3 to 4 degrees higher than during 1951 ? 1980.
dobermanmacleod: A typical global warming denier tactic, to ignore obvious and blantant signs of warming by raising a red herring. My suggestion is, if you can't bring yourself to admit the obvious (that sea ice is diminishing), then just wait a few decades and the signs of global warming will become so obvious that even you won't be able to ignore them.
The total ice in the Antarctic is increasing.
They got the cause and effect backwards with Co2 levels and increasing temperatures.
C02 levels increase AFTER temperature.
They also insist on ignoring the fact that NASA blamed the temporary decrease in Arctic ice on wind patterns, not global warming.
Ice levels are increasing again.
In the Antarctic the warmists focus exclusively on the one small area where ice decreases and ignore the fact that overall the ice is increasing there.
It is you my friend who is in denial.
Japanese scientists recently came out and compared the AGW predictions to middle age astrology.
Do you believe in astrology?
Google Antarctic ice increasing and you'll see plenty of evidence for it.
Plenty of excuses as to why increasing ice is a bad sign of course, but that goes with the times. Increasing ice is bad, decreasing ice is bad, and likely if the ice stayed the same it would be bad as well.
its an expedition being led my a man named Andrew Regan. They are pioneering new ideas in low impact technology and are creating an educational video of their research to be used by educators. I think the more projects that are out there, the better chance we have of saving the planet from human destruction.