Posted on 01/22/2009 11:34:28 AM PST by NormsRevenge
WILKINS ICE SHELF, Antarctica (Reuters) - A huge Antarctic ice shelf is on the brink of collapse with just a sliver of ice holding it in place, the latest victim of global warming that is altering maps of the frozen continent.
"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.
The Wilkins once covered 16,000 sq km (6,000 sq miles). It has lost a third of its area but is still about the size of Jamaica or the U.S. state of Connecticut. Once the strip breaks up, the sea is likely to sweep away much of the remaining ice.
Icebergs the shape and size of shopping malls already dot the sea around the shelf as it disintegrates. Seals bask in the southern hemisphere summer sunshine on icebergs by expanses of open water.
A year ago, BAS said the Wilkins was "hanging by a thread" after an aerial survey. "Miraculously we've come back a summer later and it's still here. If it was hanging by a thread last year, it's hanging by a filament this year," Vaughan said.
Nine other shelves 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.
WARMING TO BLAME
"This ice shelf and the nine other shelves that we have seen with a similar trajectory are a consequence of warming," Vaughan said.
In total, about 25,000 sq km of ice shelves have been lost, changing maps of Antarctica. Ocean sediments indicate that some shelves had been in place for at least 10,000 years.
Vaughan stuck a GPS monitoring station on a long metal pole into the Wilkins ice on behalf of Dutch scientists. It will track ice movements via satellite.
The shelf is named after Australian George Hubert Wilkins, an early Antarctic aviator who is set to join an exclusive club of people who have a part of the globe named after them that later vanishes.
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. "When those are removed the glaciers will flow faster," Vaughan said.
Temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula have warmed by about 3 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) since 1950, the fastest rise in the southern hemisphere. There is little sign of warming elsewhere in Antarctica.
BAS scientists and two Reuters reporters stayed about an hour on the shelf at a point about 2 km wide.
"It's very unlikely that our presence here is enough to initiate any cracks," Vaughan said. "But it is likely to happen fairly soon, weeks to months, and I don't want to be here when it does."
The U.N. Climate Panel, of which Vaughan is a senior member, projected in 2007 that world sea levels were likely to rise by between 18 and 59 cm (7 and 23 inches) this century.
But it did not factor in any possible acceleration of ice loss from Antarctica. Even a small change in the rate could affect sea levels, and Antarctica's ice sheets contain enough water in total to raise world sea levels by 57 meters.
About 190 nations have agreed to work out a new U.N. treaty by the end of 2009 to slow global warming, reining in emissions from burning fossil fuels in power plants, cars and factories.
We’re Doomed!
Map of Antarctica locating Wilkins Ice Shelf on Antarctic Peninsula, with figures showing fall in ice levels from 1996 to 2006. REUTERS (Reuters)
Posted a thread not so long ago about this one.. Keywords will get you there and other places as well.
Nostradamus must have got a chuckle when he wrote of the Age of Obama ... a time of ruination and the world falling apart .. ;-)
So I guess the club meets in Atlantis.
It is currently summer in Antarctica.
WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!!..................
It’s the end of the world. WE’RE DOOMED!
It would be a neat video to see it just drop off into the ocean.
thread from July, it was hanging by a thread..
Antarctic ice shelf ‘hanging by thread’: European scientists
AFP on Yahoo ^ | 7/10/08 | AFP
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2043622/posts
The only logical thing to do to save the Wilkins Ice Shelf is to redistribute wealth. Immediately! /sarc
How cool is that! They just had a story about how those collapsing ice shelfs are so important to sea life. They release minerals and nutrients that are vital to the ecosystem there.
Al Gore shows the way by example.
If he can stand before a historic graph that shows temp rises cause CO2 rises, but imply the opposite, and get away with it,
anyone can.
Da-Yum
let’s all drive our SUV’s this weekend and see if we can speed things up. hey Argentina- surf’s up
So what?
It’s remarkable how “Global warming” only seems to affect the portion of the continent with active volcanoes.
But Reuters certainly wouldn’t want to mention the massive ice buildup elsewhere. It might confuse their readers.
Sell ice chips on ebay and buy carbon credits with the profits. That’ll fix it. /s
No way. Like, I just saw, like Christmas and like New Years from Australia. And like those holidays are like, in Winter.
Isn’t this the area where on the ocean floor a new volcano is bubbling??? The AGW crowd won’t crow about this, just how they are just so damn right about the climate. NOT-NOT-NOT!!! Global cooling is more likely. Psstt....I will lie also if it helps my cause and hurts their cause...
This author is a retard. No, I take that back, I just insulted the world’s retards.
A 20 metre-high ice cliff forming the edge of the Wilkins Ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula is seen from a plane January 18, 2009. (Alister Doyle/Reuters)
Antarctica's Wilkins Ice Shelf is seen disintegrating in a series of images taken from May 2008 (bottom) to July 2008 (top). A huge Antarctic ice shelf is on the brink of collapse with just a sliver of ice holding it in place, the latest victim of global warming that is altering maps of the frozen continent. (NASA/ESA/Handout/Reuters)
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