Antarctic Ice Bridge Breaks

Wilkins Ice Shelf may Break Free due to Global Warming

Apr 6, 2009 Rupert Taylor

Warmer temperatures in the Antarctic summer are causing massive ice sheets to break up and float away.

The Wilkins Ice Shelf in the Antarctic covers an area about the same size as Jamaica. Until recently, it was anchored to the Charcot and Latady islands by an ice bridge. On April 5, 2009, BBC News reported that the ice bridge had snapped. This, said the BBC could “mean the Wilkins Ice Shelf is on the brink of breaking away, and provides further evidence of rapid change in the region.”

Weakening Monitored for Fifteen Years

The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has been keeping a close eye on the Wilkins Ice Shelf for a decade and a half. It is on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, which juts out from the continent towards the southern tip of South America.

In the late southern summer of 2008, a massive iceberg broke loose from the shelf. The BAS noted this in a press release on March 25, 2008: “Scientists monitoring satellite images of the Wilkins Ice Shelf spotted that a huge (41 by 2.5 km) km2 berg the size of the Isle of Man appears to have broken away in recent days – it is still on the move.”

Professor David Vaughan of the BAS had predicted in 1993 the Wilkins Ice Shelf would become a casualty of global warming. When the large iceberg broke away in 2008 he said, “Wilkins is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula yet to be threatened. I didn’t expect to see things happen this quickly. The ice shelf is hanging by a thread – we’ll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be.”

Ice Bridge Breaks

That thread survived the southern summer of 2008 but succumbed in 2009. BAS announced on April 4, 2009 that the bridge had broken: “Satellite pictures, from the European Space Agency (ESA), revealed that the 40-km (25 mile) long strip of floating ice believed to pin the Wilkins Ice Shelf in place had snapped at its narrowest point of about 500 meters wide off the Antarctic Peninsula. As the ice shelf shattered an armada of hundreds of small icebergs was created.”

Professor Vaughan says that eight separate ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula have been retreating in the last few decades. He adds, “There is little doubt that these changes are the result of atmospheric warming on the Antarctic Peninsula, which has been the most rapid in the Southern Hemisphere.”

Now that the ice bridge has gone, much of the Wilkins Ice Shelf is expected to break away in coming Antarctic summers. The loss of the shelf will not have a major impact on ocean levels because the ice is floating. However, the BBC points out the ice on the Peninsula itself will raise sea levels if it melts and that “…the Peninsula has been one of the fastest warming places on the planet.”

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Melting Ice