A huge ice shelf the size of Connecticut is set to break away from Antarctica in what experts are saying is further proof of global warming.
Experts are warning of the breakup of a massive ice shelf blaming climate change. Photo: Wilkins ice shelf. Credit: NSIDC,Boulder Co.
The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has said the Wilkins ice shelf, which began to break away from the rest of the continent during the 1990s, may soon become the seventh of its type to be lost.
Professor David Vaughan of BAS said: "Wilkins is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula yet to be threatened. "I didn't expect to see things happen this quickly. The ice shelf is hanging by a thread - we'll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be."
BAS scientists were alerted to the disintegration of the shelf by satellite images and immediately sent an aircraft to video the breakup. (see video here)
Speaking to the BBC, Jim Elliott, a passenger on board the plane said: "We flew along the main crack and observed the sheer scale of movement from the breakage."
"Big hefty chunks of ice, the size of small houses, look as though they've been thrown around like rubble - it's like an explosion."
"We are in for a lot more events like this," Professor Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told CNN. It was Scambos who had originally alerted BAS after examining NASA satellite images.
"The amazing thing was, we saw it within hours of it beginning, in between the morning and the afternoon pictures of that day," said Scambos referring to the large chunk which had already come away.
A narrow 6km-wide beam of ice is all that is holding the ice shelf and experts believe it is only a matter of weeks before it collapses.
However the loss of the ice shelf is not expected to contribute to rise in sea levels.
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