Antarctic ice shelf breaking off download#

There, its coastal edge stretches 120 kilometers in a dazzling white wall of ice that looms up to 40 meters above the surface of the ocean and reaches over 200 meters deep. Thwaites is an outlet glacier, meaning it flows all the way to the ocean. As the weight of new snow and ice presses down, the ice beneath starts to flow like a river. Glaciers form when snow is compacted into ice over hundreds of years. Specifically, it will come from what’s been dubbed the “Doomsday Glacier”: Thwaites, one of our planet’s largest glaciers, which is roughly as extensive as Great Britain.

Much of the water will come from the region around Pine Island Bay. That water will displace several million people on coastlines around the world. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts sea levels will rise almost half a meter by 2100. The US Coast Guard icebreaker Glacier in Pine Island Bay, Antarctica, in 1985. The Glacier became the first ship to sail into Pine Island Bay. “ broke into … a beautifully calm, ice-free sea, the eye in a hurricane of ice,” glaciologist Terry Hughes later wrote of the moment-one he had been dreaming of since at least the 1970s when he first started worrying about glacial collapse. “It would lift the front of the Glacier out of the water enough to drop down on the ice and break it.” RAM! After several days of charging at sea ice with bone-aching resolve, the Glacier broke through. “You push the throttle or thrusters up,” she explains. A graduate student onboard, Jill Singer, got to try her hand at breaking ice during the voyage. It was 1985, and the researchers aboard were sailing through one of the world’s most remote places: the Amundsen Sea, Antarctica. Every rivet of the 95-meter-long ship shuddered with the impact. RAM! The bright red hull of the US Coast Guard icebreaker Glacier slammed onto the ice. Listen now, download, or subscribe to “Hakai Magazine Audio Edition” through your favorite podcast app. This article is also available in audio format.

Antarctic ice shelf breaking off download#

Stream or download audio For this article Janu| 3,700 words, about 18 minutes Share this article Photo by Zuma Press How We Came to Know and Fear the Doomsday Glacier It’s the world’s most vulnerable glacier and key to the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, yet we’re only now getting to know Thwaites Glacier. Palmer works along the ice edge of the Thwaites Glacier ice shelf in Antarctica. ESA said icebergs are traditionally named from the Antarctic quadrant in which they were originally sighted, then a sequential number, then, if the iceberg breaks, a sequential letter.The research vessel Nathaniel B. The name might sound a bit boring for the world’s largest iceberg, but it is based on science. The huge chunk of ice is now officially known as the A-76. New giant #iceberg breaking away from the Ronne Ice Shelf 13-05-2021 roughly 160 km x 25 km satellite image from #Sentinel1 /LmacupcuUW- Keith Makinson May 13, 2021ĮSA said the iceberg was first spotted by Keith Makinson, a polar oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey last week and confirmed from the US National Ice Center using ESA’s Copernicus Sentinel-1 imagery. If Antarctica’s entire ice sheet were to melt, it could raise sea levels by nearly 190 feet. That makes icebergs like this different from glaciers or ice sheets, which are found on land, and which do raise global sea levels when they break off into the ocean and melt. Once it melts, the new iceberg will not lead to a sea level rise, because it was part of a floating ice shelf – just like a melting ice cube doesn’t increase the level of the drink in your glass.

Scientists aren’t attributing this particular break-off to climate change, and instead believe it’s part of the natural cycle of iceberg calving in the region. Iceberg calving is part of the natural cycle, with huge chunks of ice breaking off the ice shelf at regular intervals. That makes it slightly larger than the Spanish island of Majorca, ESA said. The iceberg is shaped like a giant ironing board, measuring around 170 kilometers (105 miles) in length and 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) in width. The iceberg broke off the western side of the Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, the European Space Agency (ESA) said Wednesday. The world’s largest iceberg has calved from Antarctica over the past few days, a giant floating piece of ice close to 80 times the size of Manhattan.