Antartica ice shelf on brink of collapse
A huge Antarctic ice shelf is on the brink of collapse with barely a sliver of ice keeping it in place, the latest victim of global warming that is changing the map of the frozen continent.
Wilkins Ice Shelf is a flat-topped shelf that has an area of thousands of square kilometers, jutting 20 meters (65 ft) out of the sea off the Antarctic Peninsula.
But it is held together only by an ever-thinning 40-km (25-mile) strip of ice that has eroded to an hour-glass shape just 500 meters wide at its narrowest. In 1950’s, the strip was almost 100 km wide.
Scientists state that the shelf could collapse anytime now. This is the ‘warm’ season for Antartica.
The Wilkins once covered 16,000 sq km (6,000 sq miles). It has lost a third of its area but is still about the size of Jamaica or the U.S. state of Connecticut. Once the strip breaks up, the sea is likely to sweep away much of the remaining ice.
For those that have seen the movie ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, it’s a worrisome thought.
Int the last 50 years,nine other shelves have receded or collapsed around the Antarctic peninsula. Quiteoften abruptly like the Larsen A in 1995 or the Larsen B in 2002. The trend is widely blamed on climate change caused by heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels