![]() ![]() “But the actual inland ice, that’s the really unknown question. “I think the ice shelf will be gone in a matter of years to decades,” Holland said. And if that goes, researchers fear nothing may stop the rest from doing the same. ![]() Even though total collapse of the glacier could take hundreds or thousands of years, the edge is falling apart much sooner. What worries scientists is that the leading edge of the huge glacier is breaking apart in many places. These edges with warm water underneath border the ocean and provide “back support” that holds the rest of the glacier in place, preventing it from falling into the sea, Holland said. The key to the future of Thwaites is the ice shelf and its tongue. And that’s ironic – and troublesome for researchers – because overall Antarctic sea ice is unusually low for this time of year, Larter said. Much of the problem is that loads of sea ice have gravitated around the huge iceberg. It measures about 43 miles by 28 miles, almost the size of Rhode Island, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. This iceberg used to be the tongue or leading edge of Thwaites until it broke off about 20 years ago, Larter said. Thwaites is spawning more icebergs as it falls apart, Holland said. “Nobody can get to Thwaites this year,” Holland told the Associated Press on Monday. The smaller Dotson ice shelf is about 87 miles (140km) west of the Thwaites ice shelf. He is hoping that along that blinding white ice and its rugged frozen cliffs he can learn about the unseen warm ocean water nibbling away at both Dotson and Thwaites from below. Improvising, Holland decamped at the nearby Dotson ice shelf to do his research where no human had been before. This segment aired on February 17, 2020.David Holland, an environmental scientist at New York University, who planned to drill deep through the Thwaites ice shelf to measure the water’s warmth below it, is achingly close but not quite there. But the ice shelf acts as a wall, so when it melts, she says, the wall crumbles and lets melting inland ice flow into the ocean.Ĭristina Kim produced this story and edited it for broadcast with Todd Mundt. The melting ice shelf is not going to directly contribute to sea-level rise, she says. The piece floating off into the ocean is the largest remaining chunk of a larger. When the ocean warms, the glacier’s ice shelf starts melting off because 90% of a floating glacier is in the ocean. The iceberg, known as B-22A, is around 1,158 square miles in areaaround 4 times the size of New York City. These massive calving events are a result of two climate change-related factors - rising air temperature and ocean temperature, she says. ![]() “So it's much more likely to calve in the future.” “So it has nothing to buttress up against at this point,” she says. The glacier was once buttressed against a tributary ice flow, she says, but after a calving event in 2018, Pine Island “lost contact” with the tributary ice, meaning it now has “less support” and is susceptible to cracks. Scientists are worried about the future of Pine Island Glacier because its ice is retreating at an accelerated rate, exceeding 35 feet per day, she says. Small pieces have now broken off from the original iceberg. 9 - that’s roughly three times the size of San Francisco. “So many towns and cities are almost at sea level at this point.”īanwell says 120 square miles of ice broke off Pine Island on Feb. “Rising sea levels - even just by a few centimeters, even a few millimeters - is going to start flooding low lying communities worldwide,” she says. The glacier is also the biggest single contributor to global sea-level rise of any glacier on Earth, she says. The 1,255-sq-mile (3,250-sq-km) Larsen B ice shelf was known to be melting fast but no one had predicted that it would take just one month for the 200-metre-thick behemoth to completely. Pine Island Glacier is important in particular because it has the ability to raise global sea levels by four feet in total, she says. But now, calving events occur “almost annually” on Pine Island, she says. In the past, Pine Island would calve every four to six years, glaciologist Alison Banwell says. 1302 likes, 20 comments - British Antarctic Survey (britishantarcticsurvey) on Instagram: A huge iceberg the size of Greater London has calved off. The loss of large ice chunks, known as calving, is a routine process that happens to every glacier. Some parts of the content recently experienced record-high temperatures of nearly 70 degrees Fahrenheit. The glacier, known as Pine Island, is considered one of the fastest retreating glaciers in Antarctica, where the climate is changing rapidly. ![]() This month, an iceberg nearly the size of Atlanta broke off in Antarctica. Facebook Email Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica spawns new iceberg on February 11, 2020. ![]()
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