Wilkins Ice Shelf Continues Break-up, Even During Winter

by Nancy Atkinson on June 13, 2008


Satellite images reveal the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica has experienced further break-up with an area of about 160 square kilometers breaking off during May 30 -31, 2008. ESA’s Envisat satellite captured the event. This is the first ever-documented episode to occur during the Antarctic winter. The animation here, comprised of images acquired by Envisat’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) between May 30 and June 9, highlights the rapidly dwindling strip of ice that is protecting thousands of kilometers of the ice shelf from further break-up.

Wilkins Ice Shelf, a broad plate of floating ice south of South America on the Antarctic Peninsula, is connected to two islands, Charcot and Latady. In February 2008, an area of about 400 square km broke off from the ice shelf, narrowing the connection down to a 6 km strip; this latest event in May has further reduced the strip to just 2.7 km.

According to Dr. Matthias Braun from the Center for Remote Sensing of Land Surfaces, Bonn University, and Dr. Angelika Humbert from the Institute of Geophysics, Münster University, who have been investigating the dynamics of Wilkins Ice Shelf for months, this break-up has not yet finished.

“The remaining plate has an arched fracture at its narrowest position, making it very likely that the connection will break completely in the coming days,” Braun and Humbert said.
Long-term satellite monitoring over Antarctica is important because it provides authoritative evidence of trends and allows scientists to make predictions. Ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula are important indicators for on-going climate change because they are sandwiched by extraordinarily raising surface air temperatures and a warming ocean.

The Antarctic Peninsula has experienced extraordinary warming in the past 50 years of 2.5°C, Braun and Humbert explained. In the past 20 years, seven ice shelves along the peninsula have retreated or disintegrated, including the most spectacular break-up of the Larsen B Ice Shelf in 2002, which Envisat captured within days of its launch.

News Source: ESA

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  • hunter

    The problem is that the latest and most accurate measurement of ocean temperatures in the Antarctic show them cooling, not warming.
    And snow melt is decreasing, not increasing.
    I think the better explanation is that we are gathering new kinds of evidence for the first time.

  • JamesB

    David, the AGW acolyte-

    “Biased” in that information in this article was cherry-picked to promote a certain viewpoint.

    The data Nancy chose to include was selected based on bias. As hunter points out in the message above, the the warming oceans that Nancy mentions are actually cooling. The oceans cooling instead of warming would have undermined her message tremendously.

    Without the warming oceans there very little news here. She even makes up the tidbit about this happening ‘even in winter’, which was still 3 weeks off at the time Envsat made it’s observations.

    Those are two distinct and separate misrepresentations of the facts. And there was the failure to mention that this area of the Antarctic is 2% of the total and that the other 98% has been in a long term cooling trend, a fact which any fair and balanced reporting would not fail to include.

    So why the misrepresentation of data included in the report and the outright lie of omission as to the scale? Bias.

    For you to not see this bias should be embarrassing to you!

    But I suspect that you share the same bias, so of course you would be blind to it. But what other facts and truisms does this bias make you blind too?

    James

    PS- if you put an infinite number of scientists and politicians in a room with an infinite number of typewriters, in an infinite amount of time they would produce the AGW theory and it’s draconian policy recommendations (the IPCC Summary for Policymakers). We’ve simply hit that stage of infinity where it’s actually happened, but it turned out to take only 2500 scientists and politicians in a room the size of a UN building and it took only a few years. AND they’ve managed to repeat the feat 4 times!! Now we’re waiting for the Shakespeare that was actually expected….

  • jamieg

    How is late may and early june winter in antartica? It should be fall. Secondly last year global temp. was .7 degrees below normal.It hasn’t been that cold since the thirties.

  • geokstr

    David:

    Are you really looking for a blog that “…supports thoughtful, engaged dialogue, no matter what the point of view may be.”? I suspect from your dismissive tone towards “ideas” that are not on algore’s approved list that you are really searching for a blog that prints only what you believe in. There are already plenty of those. I’m looking for one that will print both sides, and this is certainly not one of them.

    Remember, it was you who said that everything that you disagree with was “congealed crap”. What’s next, calling all the non-believers “shills for Big Oil”? How about actually contributing to the discussion instead of just dissing your opponents?

    What this has come to is that it is no longer just a scientific issue, but an overwhelmingly political one. The believers wish to take over the entire world economy in a way that will be totally disastrous for humanity, likely much more so than if the world continues to warm slightly (which is all that is projected by the reigning computer models.)

    Whatever changes happen will come so gradually as to be barely noticeable, and humankind will simply adapt to the new climate with little effort. Despite the claims of the AGW proponents, there will be no 100 foot walls of water suddenly crashing down on New Orleans, Denmark or New York. In fact, there is much evidence that the planet being somewhat warmer will be good for humans and life overall. Imagine the prosperity that can occur when there are vast areas of farmland in Siberia and the Yukon that are now frozen wasteland.

    The real scientific evidence from the past, as shown through ice cores and other means, is that there have been numerous periods where climate was much warmer than today. In every one of those periods, the world was lush with life, indicating that warmth is actually a good thing. After all, CO2 is what plants eat, and oxygen is what they poop. And this is assuming that CO2 is really a greenhouse gas, when the same data shows that CO2 buildup LAGS warming by an average of 800 years.

    Hardly a case for draconian restructuring of human civilization, which is what the believers call for, with them, of course, in charge, and not personally subject to the same minute “carbon footprint” that the rest of the paeons will be forced to live within.

  • David

    geokstr said:
    “Are you really looking for a blog that “…supports thoughtful, engaged dialogue, no matter what the point of view may be.”? I suspect from your dismissive tone towards “ideas” that are not on algore’s approved list that you are really searching for a blog that prints only what you believe in. There are already plenty of those. I’m looking for one that will print both sides, and this is certainly not one of them.”

    If you’re still following this chain of comments, let me set the record straight. I am not an algore acolyte, nor am I riding the global warming bandwagon. I am simply tired of the mass of reactonary comments posted–either for the argument or against it. I was trying to have a conversation and was tired of wading through the, yes, congealed crap, that always seems to proliforate with anything that flies in the vicinity of the so-called global warming debate. For the record, I tend to side with the conservatives in this debate. But I do not assume a label. If you read the chain of postings closely, you will see the reactive tone that this article inspired. Kudos to you, however, for continuing the conversation. Maybe the post omitted facts. But that was not apparent to the general reader. Thanks JamesB for the additional info.

  • Stepan

    Большое спасибо автору. Возможно, в будущем я и на самом деле реализую подобную затею. :)

  • http://stranopedia.ru Lina

    Очень хорошая статья. Обязательно буду ждать продолжения. Эта тема конечно же интересна всем.

  • http://blog.hi-tech-sw.net/ hi-tech

    Thanks for article

  • http://azbukazdorovya.ru Ольга

    Я тоже врямя от времени такое вижу, но как-то раньше не придавала этому значения.

  • http://astronomj.ru Jar

    За статью большое спасибо, все по делу, достаточно много кто это использует

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