TROMSOE, Norway — An area of an Antarctic ice shelf nearly
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 today.
“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.
Ms. Humbert said about 700 square
kilometres of ice, bigger than Singapore or Bahrain and
almost the size of New York City, has broken off the Wilkins
this month and shattered into a mass of icebergs. She said
370 square kilometres of ice had cracked up in recent days
from the Shelf, the latest of about 10 shelves on the
Antarctic Peninsula to retreat in a trend linked by the UN
Climate Panel to global warming.
The new icebergs added to 330 square
kilometres of ice that broke up earlier this month with the
shattering of an ice bridge apparently pinning the Wilkins
in place between Charcot island and the Antarctic Peninsula.
Nine other shelves -- ice floating on the sea and linked to
the coast -- 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, according to David Vaughan, a British Antarctic
Survey scientist who landed by plane on the Wilkins ice
bridge in January.
Ms. Humbert said by telephone her
estimates were that the Wilkins could lose a total of 800 to
3,000 square kilometres of area after the ice bridge
shattered.
The Wilkins shelf has already shrunk by
about a third from its original 16,000 square kilometres
when first spotted decades ago, its ice so thick it would
have taken hundreds of years to form.
Temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula
have warmed by up to three degrees Celsius this century, Mr.
Vaughan said, a trend climate scientists blame on global
warming from burning fossil fuels in cars, factories and
power plants. The 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.
The Arctic Council, grouping nations with
territory in the Arctic, is due to meet in Tromsoe, north
Norway, on Wednesday to debate the impact of melting ice in
the north.
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