![]() ![]() “The whole shelf collapsed in just around two weeks,” said Christopher Shuman, a University of Maryland, Baltimore County, glaciologist based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. This image pair (above), acquired by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8, shows the shelf before and after it disintegrated. By the middle of the month, it had fallen apart. At the start of March 2022, the floating shelf fed by the Glenzer and Conger glaciers was still intact. The collapse has reshaped a part of the Antarctic landscape where coastal glacial ice was once thought to be stable. In March 2022, an ice shelf in East Antarctica did both. It is less common for an ice shelf to completely disintegrate. The West Antarctic ice sheet holds enough frozen water to raise sea levels by about 6 meters (20 feet) if it were to melt.It is relatively common for ice shelves in Antarctica to spawn icebergs. Scientists are worried the collapse of ice shelves, and the ice sheets behind them, could destabilize glaciers in Western Antarctica. "The data allows us to create models to make more long-term forecasts for even bigger ice shelves." ![]() She added that lessons learned from Larsen C are potentially very significant for the future. It's very exciting because we can monitor the entire process now - something we haven't been able to do before," Jansen said. "We receive new satellite images every six days. That's one reason the break of the Larsen C ice shelf has garnered so much attention. The Antarctic is a highly complicated system, and scientists haven't been monitoring long enough to detect trends and make forecasts. If an ice shelf collapse allowed that ice to flow into the sea, it would melt, contributing to sea level rise. These shelves of sea ice act to hold back inland glaciers. Linkeĭata from the Antarctic research project MIDAS at the University of Swansea in the United Kingdom already point toward an eventual collapse - which could take decades.īut unlike the icebergs that break off of the ice shelf, the ice behind it is on land. Penguins don't live in the region of the break and will not be affected Image: picture alliance/blickwinkel/R. Scientists will now be monitoring Larsen C to see if it follows the natural cycle and grows again - or melts further and eventually collapses. "The question is now whether the trend will spread toward the south and destabilize Larsen C, too." "The collapse of Larsen A and B has been connected to warming ocean temperatures in the Antarctic Peninsula," said Jansen. Scientists attribute these collapses, and the retreat of several Antarctic ice shelves in recent decades, to global warming. Larsen A disappeared in 1995, and seven years later Larsen B collapsed. Two smaller shelves to the north have already collapsed. They don't raise the amount of water in the glass when they melt."īut the latest break could cause the Larsen C ice shelf to become unstable and eventually collapse. "It's like ice cubes in a glass of water. "The iceberg won't raise global sea levels," Daniela Jansen, a geophysicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, told DW. As a result, the ice shelf grows by an average of 760 yards (700 meters) each year.Īt some point, a section breaks away and the ice shelf begins to grow again. While the new iceberg will have little to no immediate impact on the region or its biodiversity, scientists are worried about the long-term effects.īreakaways of icebergs in the Antarctic are part of a natural cycle. The Larsen C ice shelf has now been reduced in sized by a record 10 percent. The crack suddenly extended 11 miles (17 kilometers) within one week in May. Towards the end, the process accelerated. Scientists who have been observing the growing crack in the Larsen C ice shelf for months announced Wednesday that the trillion-ton iceberg had finally broken away at some point in the last two days. The new iceberg is one of the largest ever recorded. A 2,200-square-mile (5,800-square-kilometer) chunk of ice has separated from the Larsen C ice shelf. ![]()
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