Ice Bridge Holding Wilkins Ice Shelf Breaks Up

It’s only a matter of time before we’ll be saying RIP, Wilkins Ice Shelf. The ever-shrinking Antarctic ice shelf had been held together by an ice bridge that has now collapsed, increasing concern over how fast global warming is affecting the area. A satellite photo from the European Space Agency showed that the 40km bridge splintered at its narrowest point, which was about 500 feet across.

David Vaughan, a glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey, says change in the Antarctic is rearely so dramatic.

From Reuters:

The Wilkins, now the size of Jamaica or the U.S. state of Connecticut, is one of 10 shelves to have shrunk or collapsed in recent years on the Antarctic Peninsula, where temperatures have risen in recent decades apparently because of global warming.

The loss of the ice bridge, jutting about 20 meters out of the water and which was almost 100 km wide in 1950, may now allow ocean currents to wash away far more of the Wilkins shelf.

“My feeling is that we will lose more of the ice, but there will be a remnant to the south,” said Vaughan. Ice shelves float on the water, formed by ice spilling off Antarctica, and can be hundreds of meters thick.

The Antarctic is changing rapidly, to the extent that scientists – including those involved in a new study conducted by the US Geological Survey and British Antarctic Survey – widely regard the incredibly fast transformation of the map area to be among the most “profound, unambiguous examples of global warming on Earth”.

And yet there are still people out there who don’t believe climate change is a threat. They also believe that the Earth is flat, Bigfoot lives in their backyard, Elvis and Tupac are hanging out drinking daquiries somewhere in South America, Britney Spears sings live at all her concerts and the moon landing was taped by Steven Spielberg in a studio lot in California.

Link [Reuters]
Photo credit: REUTERS/Alister Doyle

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