Antarctic ice breakup

[martien007]

A 414 km2 section of Antarctica has started to disintegrate

A section of the Antarctic sea ice equivalent to nearly four times the area of ​​the city of Paris has started to disintegrate under the effect of rapid global warming, the University's National Snow and Ice Center said on Tuesday. of Colorado (NSIDC).

According to satellite images, this disintegration is already on a 414 km2 piece of ice that is part of the Wilkins Plateau and began on February 28 with the sudden release of an iceberg 25,5 km long and 2,4 km wide. on the southwest flank.

This movement triggered the disintegration of a 569 km2 block of the Wilkins Plateau, of which 414 km2 have already disappeared.

This plateau, which covers an area of ​​12.950 km2, is currently supported by a narrow strip of ice 5,6 km between two islands, explained in a statement Ted Scambos, scientific manager of the NSIDC (National Snow and Ice Data Center).

It is the largest pack ice in Antarctica.

"If the ice continues to retreat, this band of ice could disintegrate and then we would probably lose half of the pack ice in this region over the next few years," he said.

Over the past fifty years, the western part of the Antarctic Peninsula has experienced the largest temperature increase on the globe with an increase of 0,5 degrees Celsius every ten years.

"We believe the Wilkins Plateau has been around for a few hundred years, but warm air and ocean waves are causing it to break up," said Ted Scambos, who first saw the disintegration in March.

With summer drawing to a close in Antarctica, scientists do not predict any further disintegration of the Wilkins Plateau in the coming months.

David Vaughan, a scientist from the British Antarctic Survey who took part in the work of measuring the melting of the ice, stresses that the disintegration of the Wilkins plateau will not directly affect the sea level because this piece of sea ice was already floating before becoming liquid.

"But this is another indication of the impact of climate change in the region," he commented.

In recent years, the pack ice bordering the Antarctic Peninsula has experienced rapid dislocation.

In 1995, the Larsen A plateau, 75 km long and 37 km wide, broke apart and then fragmented into icebergs in the Weddel Sea.

On March 19, 2002, a NASA satellite observed the collapse of Larsen B, with a surface area of ​​3.850 km2 and 200 meters high, which contained 720 billion tonnes of ice.

The accelerated melting of Antarctic ice - more than 13.000 km2 of sea ice has disappeared in fifty years - could contribute significantly to the rise in sea levels. According to some projections at the current rate (+ 3 mm per year from 1996 to 2006), the oceans could have gained 1,40 meters by the end of the century