Free Republic

Research ship the Nathaniel B Palmer at the Thwaites Ice Shelf in Antarctica. Credit: Aleksandra Mazur A process that can contribute to the melting of ice shelves in the Antarctic has been discovered by researchers. An international team of researchers has discovered that adjacent ice shelves play a role in causing instability in others downstream. The University of East Anglia in the UK led a study that identified that the amount of glacial-meltwater flowing beneath the Thwaites Ice Shelf can be impacted by a small ocean gyre next to it. A weaker gyre allows more warm water to access...

Key points: “It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5°C,” IPCC Working Group III co-chair Jim Skea said. The 1.5 degrees Celsius goal is the aspirational temperature threshold ascribed in the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement. The IPCC’s latest report follows a series of mind-bending extreme weather events worldwide. For instance, in just the last few weeks, an ice shelf the size of New York City collapsed in East Antarctica following record high temperatures and heavy rains deluged Australia’s east coast, submerging entire towns. The IPCC has warned that about half of the world's population is...

A large rift is widening across an increasingly fragile Antarctic ice shelf, scientists found. The crack is spreading across the Larsen C Ice Shelf at an increased rate, threatening to carve out an iceberg the size of Delaware while destabilizing a larger area of ice roughly the size of Scotland. When this iceberg calving event happens — no one knows exactly when it will occur, except that it's getting closer — it will be the largest calving event in Antarctica since 2000, the third-biggest ever recorded and the largest from this particular ice shelf, scientists say. About 10 to 12...

(CNN)—One of the last remaining sections of Antarctica's Larsen B Ice Shelf is dramatically weakening, according to a new NASA study. The study predicts that what remains of the once-prominent ice shelf, a thick floating platform of ice, most likely will "disintegrate completely" before the end of this decade Ice shelves are extensions of glaciers and function as barriers. Their disappearance means glaciers potentially will diminish more quickly, as well, increasing the pace at which global sea levels rise.

Paris (AFP) - The largest ice shelf in the Antarctic peninsula is being thinned by warmer seas and air and could catastrophically break up, scientists said on Wednesday. The loss of the Larsen C ice shelf could occur within a century but an earlier collapse cannot be ruled out, with major consequences for global sea levels, they said. "We now know that two different processes are causing Larsen C to thin and become less stable," said Paul Holland from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) who led the new research. "If this vast ice shelf... was to collapse, it would allow...

Climate Change: As a Colorado Rockies playoff game is snowed out, scientists report that Arctic sea ice is thickening and Antarctic snow melt is the lowest in three decades. Whatever happened to global warming? Al Gore wasn't there to throw out the first snowball, er, baseball, so he might not have noticed that Saturday's playoff game between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies was snowed out - in early October. The field should have been snow-free just as the North Pole was to be ice-free this year. It seems that ice at both poles hasn't been paying attention to...

Climate Change: As a Colorado Rockies playoff game is snowed out, scientists report that Arctic sea ice is thickening and Antarctic snow melt is the lowest in three decades. Whatever happened to global warming? Al Gore wasn't there to throw out the first snowball, er, baseball, so he might not have noticed that Saturday's playoff game between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies was snowed out — in early October. The field should have been snow-free just as the North Pole was to be ice-free this year. It seems that ice at both poles hasn't been paying attention to...

TROMSOE, Norway (Reuters) – 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 Tuesday. "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 (270.3 sq mile) of ice -- bigger than Singapore or Bahrain and almost the...

PARIS (AFP) – The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said the breakway of a Jamaica-sized ice shelf from the Antarctic peninsula could accelerate global warming in this already vulnerable region. Satellite pictures show a 40-kilometre (25-mile) ice bridge that was the Wilkins Ice Shelf's last link to the coast had now shattered at its narrowest point, about 500 metres (yards) wide, UNEP said. The Wilkins Ice Shelf once covered around 16,000 square kilometres (6,000 square miles) before it began to retreat in the 1990s, and by last May the ice bridge was all that connected it to Charcot and Latady islands....

PARIS (AFP) – A Jamaica-sized ice shelf is close to wrenching itself away from Antarctica, following dramatic weakening of an ice "bridge" linking it to the continent, the European Space Agency (ESA) reported Friday. The icy umbilical cord tying the Wilkins Ice Shelf to two islands on the Antarctic peninsula "looks set to collapse," ESA said. The evidence comes from radar pictures taken on Thursday by its Envisat Earth-monitoring satellite, the Paris-based agency said in a press release. Scientists have been keeping a worried eye on this ice shelf for years. For many, it is a barometer of global warming,...

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...

PARIS (AFP) - New evidence has emerged that a large plate of floating ice shelf attached to Antarctica is breaking up, in a troubling sign of global warming, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Thursday. Images taken by its Envisat remote-sensing satellite show that Wilkins Ice Shelf is "hanging by its last thread" to Charcot Island, one of the plate's key anchors to the Antarctic peninsula, ESA said in a press release. "Since the connection to the island... helps stabilise the ice shelf, it is likely the breakup of the bridge will put the remainder of the ice shelf...

Satellite images show the runaway disintegration of a 160-square-mile chunk in western Antarctica, which started Feb. 28. It was the edge of the Wilkins ice shelf and has been there for hundreds, maybe 1,500 years. This is the result of global warming, said British Antarctic Survey scientist David Vaughan. Because scientists noticed satellite images within hours, they diverted satellite cameras and even flew an airplane over the ongoing collapse for rare pictures and video. "It's an event we don't get to see very often," said Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo....

A vast ice shelf hanging on by a thin strip looks to be the next chunk to break off from the Antarctic Peninsula, the latest sign of global warming's impact on Earth's southernmost continent. Scientists are shocked by the rapid change of events. Glaciologist Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado was monitoring satellite images of the Wilkins Ice Shelf and spotted a huge iceberg measuring 25 miles by 1.5 miles (41 kilometers by 2.5 kilometers - about 10 times the area of Manhattan) that appeared to have broken away from the shelf. Scambos alerted colleagues at the British Antarctic...

TORONTO - A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada's Arctic, scientists said. The mass of ice broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 497 miles south of the North Pole, but no one was present to see it in Canada's remote north. Scientists using satellite images later noticed that it became a newly formed ice island in just an hour and left a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake. Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, traveled to the newly formed ice island...

The theory of global warming proposes that man's activities are causing the Earth to heat up, but there is compelling scientific evidence that does not support this conclusion.   Very few people have heard of the Larsen B ice shelf. For thousands of years in the Antarctic, the place was a desolate frozen wasteland, crisscrossed by crevasses and swept by powerful ice and snowstorms. Beginning in 2002, satellite imagery began to show instability in the Larsen B ice shelf. According to research published by the journal Nature, much of the more than 4,600 square mile ice shelf collapsed. Since then, icebergs...

SYRACUSE, N.Y. - An expansive ecosystem of knee-high mud volcanoes, snowy microbial mats and flourishing clam communities lies beneath the collapsed Larsen Ice Shelf in Antarctica, say researchers. The discovery made in February in a deep glacial trough in the northwestern Weddell Sea was detailed this week in Eos, the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union. Such sunless, cold-vent ecosystems have been found elsewhere — near Monterey, Calif., in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Sea of Japan — but never in Antarctica, the report said. "Seeing those organisms on the ocean bottom, it's like lifting the carpet...

Antarctic ice shelf retreats happened before No: 4/2005 23 Feb 2005 The retreat of Antarctic ice shelves is not new according to research published this week (24 Feb) in the journal Geology by scientists from Universities of Durham, Edinburgh and British Antarctic Survey (BAS). A study of George VI Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula is the first to show that this currently ‘healthy’ ice shelf experienced an extensive retreat about 9500 years ago, more than anything seen in recent years. The retreat coincided with a shift in ocean currents that occurred after a long period of warmth. Whilst rising...

LONDON — The current retreat of ice shelves in the Antarctic due to global warming is nothing new -- but this time the problem is manmade and therefore potentially more serious, according to research released Wednesday. Writing in the latest issue of the journal "Geology," British scientists said a survey had shown that ice shelves had retreated thousands of years ago as a result of rising air and ocean temperatures. "What this tells us is that ice shelves don't just break up because they get too big -- as the global warning skeptics argue," said Dominic Hodgson, a scientist with...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 May 27 Antarctic Ice Shelf Vista Credit & Copyright: Helmut Rott (U. Innsbruck) Explanation: It's all gone but the mountains. Most of the sprawling landscape of ice that lies between the mountains visible above has now disintegrated. The above picture was taken in Antarctica from the top of Grey Nunatak, one of three Seal Nunatak mountains that border the Larsen B Ice-Shelf. The other two Nunataks are...