Antarctica shows the climate warming before the Arctic Ocean.
In realizing the fact Antarctica, a land mass, exhibits a warming planet earlier than the Arctic Ocean what then can speak to that reality?
This picture was the Larsen Ice Shelves. There are three. Larsen A, Larsen B and Larsen C. They were a part of a section of Antarctica called WAIS (West Antarctica Ice Shelf).
Larsen A collapsed in 1995. With that collapse Larsen B was able to extend it's massive volume of ice into that empty spot along the Antarctica circumpolar ocean circulation.
Larsen B showed cracking in 2001 and collapsed in 2002/
...The collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf (click here) was captured in this series of
images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra
satellite between January 31 and April 13, 2002. At the start of the
series, the ice shelf (left) is tattooed with parallel lines of blue
dots. The dots are pools of meltwater, and they are arranged in lines
because the water drained into existing crevasses. Beneath a thin layer
of clouds, a smattering of icebergs appears in the dark, open waters of
the bay (right).
By February 17, the leading edge of the C-shaped shelf had retreated
about 10 kilometers (6 miles) as the shelf began to splinter. The next
good view of the area came on February 23; several more long and narrow
ice bergs had fractured from the shelf in the south. By March 7, the
shelf had disintegrated into a blue-tinged mixture (mélange) of slush
and ice bergs. Many of the bergs were too tall and narrow to float
upright. They toppled over and spread out across the bay like a neat row
of books that had been knocked off a shelf....
The collapse of these ice shelves didn't occur in a day, it took a very long time to have enough erosion by warmth take place to cause such dramatic events. These are major climatic events. The ice shelves are massive and wind moving across them when not weakened effect the cooling of Earth. These structures are vital to Earth's climate and now they are gone. The day this shelf collapsed, Earth's warming accelerated.
