Giant crack in Antarctic ice to create huge iceberg
03 Jun 2017
An Antarctic ice shelf that had existed for thousands of years will soon shed a 1,000-foot-thick block of ice, roughly the size of Delaware.
New satellite images revealed, a huge crack or rift in the Larsen C ice shelf had suddenly forked and accelerated toward the Southern Ocean. Scientists cannot say exactly when the rift will snap off the block, which made up about 10 per cent of Larsen C's total area. However, according to Dan McGrath, a scientist with the US Geological Survey, it will not be long.
"I would expect it to occur quite rapidly, within days or weeks," McGrath, who researches Larsen C, told Reuters on Thursday.
According to Adrian Luckman and Martin O'Leary, both scientists with Swansea University in the UK, the crack grew 11 miles from 25 May through 31 May, and less than that - just 8 miles of ice was all that stood between the birth of an enormous iceberg.
"The rift tip appears also to have turned significantly towards the ice front, indicating that the time of calving is probably very close," Luckman and O'Leary wrote in a blog post for the Melt on Ice Shelf Dynamics and Stability project (MIDAS). "[T]here appears to be very little to prevent the iceberg from breaking away completely."
According to scientists, the process known as calving happened periodically but researchers were watching closely to see whether climate change was affecting the phenomenon.
Climate change was changing conditions in Antarctica at an alarming pace, and in certain parts of Antarctica, scientists describe an "irreversible situation" where ice flowing into the sea was quietly raising the risk of coastal floods across the world. Penguins were struggling to survive on the rapidly warming continent, according to research released in April. Also Antarctica had seen record breaking low levels of sea ice in what, according to scientists, was a sign of an overheating planet.
