Klimaatverandering 144

Published on Saturday, April 4, 2009 by the Associated Press
Ice Shelf About to Break Away From Antarctica
New rifts' appeared this week along Wilkins; shelf holds back ice on land

PARIS - A massive ice shelf anchored to the Antarctic coast by a narrow and
quickly deteriorating ice bridge could break away soon, the European Space
Agency warned Friday.

The Paris-based agency said satellite images show the bridge that connects
the Wilkins Ice Shelf to Charcot and Latady Islands "looks set to
collapse."

"The beginning of what appears to be the demise of the ice bridge began
this week when new rifts" appeared and a large block of ice broke away, it
said.

The Wilkins Ice Shelf - which like the rest of Antarctic's ice sheet "was
formed by thousands of years of accumulated and compacted snow" - had been
stable for most of the last century before it began retreating in the
1990s, the statement said.

The shelf, which was originally of Jamaica or the U.S. state of
Connecticut, is located on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula,
which thrusts up from the continent toward the southern tip of South
America.

Originally covering about 5,000 square miles, the ice shelf lost 14 percent
of its mass last year alone, the statement quotes a scientist Angelika
Humbert of Germany's Munster University as saying.

In two 2008 incidents, large chunks of the ice bridge fell away, shaving it
down to just 985 yards across at its narrowest, the statement said.

As a result, "in the past months, we have observed the ice bridge deforming
and its narrowest location acting as a kind of hinge," Humbert is quoted as
saying.

Scientist are examining whether global warming is behind the shelf's
breakup, the statement said. Average temperatures in the Antarctic
Peninsula have risen by 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the past half century,
the statement said - higher than the average global rise.