BREAKING up is getting easier to do, it seems, especially when it comes to the Antarctic Peninsula. On 3 April, showed that an ice bridge which connected two islands to the Wilkins ice shelf had shattered. This has left the shelf vulnerable to the ocean and in danger of breaking away from the peninsula.
Last year, the 13,000-square-kilometre Wilkins ice shelf released huge chunks of ice, leaving a narrow ice bridge as the only connection between the northern front of the ice shelf and the ice surrounding nearby Charcot and Latady islands.
Now that ice bridge has collapsed 鈥� leaving an iceberg-filled channel in its wake 鈥� the northern front of the shelf is exposed. 鈥淲e expect in the next few days and weeks that the northern ice front will lose between 800 and 3700 square kilometres of ice,鈥� says of the Institute of Geophysics at M眉nster University, Germany.
Advertisement
The break-up of the Wilkins ice shelf will not lead to sea-level rise as it is already floating on water, and nor will it speed up the movement of any glaciers into the oceans. Nevertheless, these events serve as a dire warning, says Humbert: 鈥淚t shows us that ice shelves have the potential to become unstable on very short timescales.鈥�
If other ice shelves in the region start calving, then the glaciers that feed them could slip faster into the ocean, leading to sea-level rise.