New York City-sized ice collapses off Antarctica (Wilkins ice shelf breaking into icebergs)

Reuters on Yahoo ^ | 4/28/09 | Alister Doyle

[NormsRevenge]

TROMSOE, Norway (Reuters) – An area of an Antarctic ice shelf almost the size of New York City has broken into icebergs this month after the collapse of an ice bridge widely blamed on global warming, a scientist said Tuesday.

"The northern ice front of the Wilkins Ice Shelf has become unstable and the first icebergs have been released," Angelika Humbert, glaciologist at the University of Muenster in Germany, said of European Space Agency satellite images of the shelf.

Humbert told Reuters about 700 sq km (270.3 sq mile) of ice -- bigger than Singapore or Bahrain and almost the size of New York City -- has broken off the Wilkins this month and shattered into a mass of icebergs.

She said 370 sq kms of ice had cracked up in recent days from the Shelf, the latest of about 10 shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula to retreat in a trend linked by the U.N. Climate Panel to global warming.

The new icebergs added to 330 sq kms of ice that broke up earlier this month with the shattering of an ice bridge apparently pinning the Wilkins in place between Charcot island and the Antarctic Peninsula.

Nine other shelves -- ice floating on the sea and linked to the coast -- have receded or collapsed around the Antarctic peninsula in the past 50 years, often 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, according to David Vaughan, a British Antarctic Survey scientist who landed by plane on the Wilkins ice bridge with two Reuters reporters in January.

[kingu]

Actually, fall in Antarctica, you know, other side of the planet from us, tends to get warm when we get cold, when we get warm, it gets cold, that sort of thing.

So, yeah, it's at the end of the warm season and the cold should be settling in quite nicely in the next few weeks.

A glacier calving into the water - wow, absolutely shocking that, you'd almost imagine that there was like, I donno, a tourist opportunity with such things, like, oh, say Alaska?

[razorback-bert]

Surf’s up!

[philman_36]

And now for a little balance, which isn't in the article because it doesn't suit "the agenda"...
Antarctic ice is growing, not melting away
ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap.
Snip...Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica. The destabilisation of the Wilkins ice shelf generated international headlines this month.
Snip...Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.

[DTogo]

Great news! How soon until Washington DC is underwater and Fedzilla is forced to exist outside the Beltway among us bitter, gun-clinging, right-wing, extremists??

[BIGLOOK]

Looks like a whole lot of pressure fracturing going on down there, Norm. The Global Warming crowd has less than a hundred years of data, less than fifty years of technological capabilities to observe the calving of ice bergs from an ice sheet and only a few years in college studying under sixties drug addled professors who desperately need a paper to publish.

It's as if these events have never happened before as they depend only on current satellite imaging and poorly written computer model programs that cherry pick data that gratifies their ego theories and ignores science. It also ignores hundreds of years of maritime navigation and exploration....the logs of ships (and later subs) that sailed the southern seas and reported their observations accurately.....as their lives depended on it.

A Japanese skipper on a whaling ship has a better sense of the science of the polar ice than a Global Warming proponent.

[GOPJ]

almost the size of New York City

That's not very big...

[TigersEye]

The trend is widely blamed on climate change caused by heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels, according to David Vaughan, a British Antarctic Survey scientist grant weasel...

[FreepShop1]

NO CHANGE CAN OCCUR ON THE PLANET!

ANY AND ALL CHANGES ARE THE FAULT OF MANKIND!

[FreepShop1]

NYC is very small compared with Antarctica.

[dr_lew]

Isn’t it basically the end of summer in Antarctica?

It's late autumn in the southern hemisphere, with April corresponding to the northern October. In the extreme southern latitudes, the winter night comes on fast after the equinox. Checking with my "Starry Night" software just now, I set my location for the vicinity of the Wilkins Ice Shelf and found that the sun barely comes up to the horizon at noon, and never actually rises at this date.

Any continuing erosion of the ice shelf would be, I believe, due to the water remaining warm, just as we expect the ocean water to remain warm into October off the eastern Atlantic seaboard.

[smokingfrog]

Kool!

[verity]

Is this another of those Tanqueray ® advertisements?

[Interesting Times]

Here's a map that underscores your point:

The larger portion of Antarctica is cooling and gaining mass.

[idkfa]

Good article on this ice shelf at wattsupwiththat.com:
The Antarctic Wilkins Ice Shelf Collapse: Media recycles photos and storylines from previous years

[thefactor]

is that the air or water temp? or doesn’t that matter?

[FreeKeys]

"The next time somebody in the media denies that there is media bias, ask how they explain the fact that there are at least a hundred stories about the shrinking arctic ice cap for every one about the expanding antarctic ice cap, which has now grown to record size." --Thomas Sowell

[philman_36]

Who you going to believe, the media or your lying eyes? {;^)

[philman_36]

Aside...Polar shift of some sort?

[philman_36]

BTTT!

[Interesting Times]

Aside...Polar shift of some sort?

I think that would have been noticed.