12/10/2023 0 Comments Antarctica iceberg breaks off 2020This article was originally published on. 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. When the ocean warms, the glacier's ice shelf starts melting off because 90% of a floating glacier is in the ocean. 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. 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. 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. The Amery Ice Shelf is Antarctica's third largest ice shelf.This month, an iceberg nearly the size of Atlanta broke off in Antarctica. The largest iceberg to break away from the ice shelf was more than five times the size of D28, and left the continent in the 1960s. This is the second biggest calving event for the Amery Ice Shelf itself. That distinction belongs to iceberg B15, a 4,200-square mile behemoth which broke away from Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf in 2000, also in a calving event. While the D28 iceberg is itself large, weighing around 347 tons with an area approximately 27 times the size of Manhattan, it dwarfs in comparison to the current record holder for largest iceberg. The iceberg's progress will continue to be monitored to minimize the potential threat it could pose to shipping lanes. It's predicted to take up to several years for D28 to fully break up and melt away. The Antarctic Ozone Hole This Year Could Be The Smallest Since 1988.Antarctica Ice Shelf Has Thinned by up to 23 Percent Since 1970s.Over 65,000 Supraglacial Lakes Discovered on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.We knew it would happen eventually, but just to keep us all on our toes, it is not exactly where we expected it to be." "I am excited to see this calving event after all these years. "It is the molar compared to a baby tooth," Scripps Institution of Oceanography Professor Helen Frick told BBC News. Its significantly smaller companion D28 is part that broke away, but Loose Tooth is still attached to the shelf, despite scientists having predicted in 2002 it would break off between 20. In order for the process to continue, occasionally icebergs must give way to the pressure of incoming ice and "calve" away from the ice shelf, floating into the ocean.ĭ28 had been adjacent to a part of the ice shelf scientists had been predicting would break away from the continent for nearly two decades, known as "Loose Tooth." The area held the nickname due to satellite images thought to resemble a crooked tooth hanging from the "mouth" of the surrounding ice. A giant iceberg broke off the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica on Friday, not far from a British scientific outpost. The loss of D28 instead occurred due to a natural ice shelf process, called a "calving event." Antarctic ice shelves are essentially oceanic extensions of ice moving away from the continent's surface, due to the process of glaciers moving off the land of Antarctica and into the ocean. Though this file photo from 2017 was from NASA's Operation Icebridge, looking at how polar ice has evolved over the last decade, the recent iceberg breaking is a natural event, unrelated to climate change.
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