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Level 3 – Intermediate
Antarctic ice shelf collapses
An enormous floating ice shelf in Antarctica which has existed since the last Ice Age, 12,000 years ago, has collapsed and is disintegrating into thousands of icebergs. Scientists had expected the Larsen B shelf to break up eventually but they were amazed at the speed at which it happened. The 500 million billion ton ice sheet was 200 metres thick and had a surface area of 3,250 square kilometres and it took only five weeks for it to break away from the Antarctic land mass during one of the warmest summers on record in the region.
US scientists also reported that a giant iceberg more than nine times larger than Singapore had broken free from the continent. The iceberg, which has been named B-22, is more than 64 kilometres wide and 85 kilometres long, and covers an area of about 5,500 square kilometres.
Scientists say that climate changes are the cause of the collapse of the ice shelves. The climate in the region has changed rapidly over the last fifty years, with average temperatures 2.5°C higher today. Scientists say that the disintegration of the ice sheets will not cause sea levels to rise in the short term because the ice is floating and not melting. Sea levels will only be affected if the land ice behind the shelves starts to flow more rapidly into the sea. This is a possibility if the warming trend continues. Already scientists have identified other ice shelves which are unstable and likely to collapse in the next few years.
For glaciologists, these events are fascinating and they hope that the data they collect will help them understand the climate changes taking place better and enable them to predict what is going to happen in the rest of Antarctica. For many other people in the world, it is frightening because we just do not know what will happen.
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C2 Mastery
