![]() (Copernicus Sentinel data (2021)/ESA, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)Ī giant slab of ice has sheared off from the frozen edge of Antarctica into the Weddell Sea, becoming the largest iceberg afloat in the world, the European Space Agency said on Wednesday. This animation uses images from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission and shows the giant slab of ice breaking off from the Ronne Ice Shelf, lying in the Weddell Sea, on. But what we are seeing now, with the collapse of the Conger ice shelf and others, is the continuation of a worrying trend whereby Antarctic ice shelves undergo area-wide collapse one after another.The world’s largest iceberg, dubbed A-76, has calved from Antarctica. Antarctica loses mass through the discharge of icebergs and waxing and waning ice shelves as part of a natural cycle. Not everything that happens in nature is due to global warming alone. There is enough ice in the West Antarctic ice sheet to raise sea levels by several meters, and if East Antarctica starts losing significant amounts of ice, the impact on sea levels could be measured in tens of meters. And as more and more ice shelves around Antarctica collapse, ice loss will increase, and with it global sea levels. And due to its shape, the Conger ice shelf was most likely not a significant buttress to the flow of ice upstream.īut global warming is making events like this more likely. The consequences of the Conger ice shelf collapse are unlikely to be of global significance as the catchment area feeding ice into the former shelf is small. Bertie Miles/US Geological Survey/European Space Agency, Author provided The Conger ice shelf (outlined in blue) before and after its final calving events. And what happens in Antarctica does not stay in Antarctica. Here’s what’s driving them, and how they’ll impact wildlifeĪs glaciologists, we see the impact of global warming on Antarctica in increasing ice loss with time. Record-smashing heatwaves are hitting Antarctica and the Arctic simultaneously. The most recent sequence of events also preceded the record high air temperatures recorded in Antarctica on March 18. It is too soon to say what triggered the collapse of the Conger ice shelf, but it appears unlikely to have been caused by melting at the surface – there are no indications of any ponds atop the ice shelf. Taken together, this series of collapses suggests that some underlying environmental conditions, such as ocean and atmosphere temperatures, are changing. In East Antarctica, where Conger once was, Cook ice Shelf was partially lost in the 1970s. ![]() But in recent decades, scientists have seen several large ice shelves undergoing total disintegration.Īlong the Antarctic Peninsula, the whip-like land mass which extends from the West Antarctic mainland, these include Prince Gustav ice shelf (from 1989 to 1995), Larsen A ice shelf (1995), Larsen B (2002), and Wilkins ice shelf (2008 to 2009). The breaking and detachment of parts of ice shelves is a natural process: ice shelves generally go through cycles of slow growth punctuated by isolated calving events. ![]() ![]() Bertie Miles/US Geological Survey, Author provided The ice shelf had been slowly breaking apart for 50 years. When an ice shelf like Conger is lost, the grounded ice once kept behind the shelf may start to flow faster as the restraining force of the ice shelf is lost, resulting in more ice tumbling into the ocean.Ĭonger mapped from satellite images taken between 19. By restraining how much the grounded ice flows upstream, they can control the loss of ice from the interior of the sheet into the ocean. Smaller ice shelves are found where continental ice meets the sea in Greenland, northern Canada and the Russian Arctic. The world’s largest ice shelves fringe Antarctica, extending its ice sheet into the frigid Southern Ocean. Two calving events on March 5 and 7 reduced it further, detaching it from Bowman and precipitating its final collapse a week later. Since the beginning of satellite observations in the 1970s, the tip of the shelf had been disintegrating into icebergs in a series of what glaciologists call calving events.Ĭonger was already reduced to a 50km-long and 20km-wide strip attached to Antarctica’s vast continental ice sheet at one end and the ice-covered Bowman Island at the other. East Antarctica’s Conger ice shelf – a floating platform the size of Rome – broke off the continent on March 15, 2022.
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