Just a small sliver of ice is holding a giant Antarctic ice shelf in place, with experts saying that it will collapse any time now. The Wilkins Ice Shelf is the latest victim of global warming, set to join nine other shelves that already have been be lost around the Antarctic peninsula in the past 50 years.
From Reuters:
“We’ve come to the Wilkins Ice Shelf to see its final death throes,” David Vaughan, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), told Reuters after the first — and probably last — plane landed near the narrowest part of the ice.
The flat-topped shelf has an area of thousands of square kilometers, jutting 20 meters (65 ft) out of the sea off the Antarctic Peninsula.
But it is held together only by an ever-thinning 40-km (25-mile) strip of ice that has eroded to an hour-glass shape just 500 meters wide at its narrowest.
In 1950, the strip was almost 100 km wide.
“It really could go at any minute,” Vaughan said on slushy snow in bright sunshine beside a red Twin Otter plane that landed on skis. He added that the ice bridge could linger weeks or months.
Temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula have warmed by 3 degrees Celcius since 1950, the fastest rise in the Southern Hemisphere. Though loss of ice shelves does not in itself raise sea levels since the ice is floating and already mostly submerged, it could allow ice sheets on land to move faster, which would add extra water to the seas.
The U.N. Climate Panel projected in 2007 that world sea levels were likely to rise between 18cm and 59cm this century, but that doesn’t even take Antarctica ice shelf loss into consideration. Even a small change in the rate of ice shelf loss could affect sea levels, and Antarctica’s ice sheets contain enough water to raise world sea levels by 57 meters.
Link [Reuters]
