ANTARCTIC LOSING ICE SHELF (click here)
PARIS--The European Space Agency is warning that a massive ice shelf anchored to the Antarctic coast by a narrow and quickly deteriorating ice bridge could break away soon.
The Paris-based agency says satellite images show the bridge that connects the Wilkins Ice Shelf to Charcot and Latady Islands looks set to collapse."
It says: 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.
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.
First the vortices in late 2002, then the collapse of the 'thermostat' ability of the Arctic Ocean and now the repeated events in Antarctica. It's going very fast. The Arctic Ocean was crucial.
An Antarctic ice shelf has disappeared -scientists (click title to article - thank you)
Fri Apr 3, 2009 6:27pm EDT
...Climate change is to blame, according to the report from the U.S. Geological Survey and the British Antarctic Survey, available at pubs.usgs.gov/imap/2600/B."
The rapid retreat of glaciers there demonstrates once again the profound effects our planet is already experiencing -- more rapidly than previously known -- as a consequence of climate change," U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement....
PARIS--The European Space Agency is warning that a massive ice shelf anchored to the Antarctic coast by a narrow and quickly deteriorating ice bridge could break away soon.
The Paris-based agency says satellite images show the bridge that connects the Wilkins Ice Shelf to Charcot and Latady Islands looks set to collapse."
It says: 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.
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.
First the vortices in late 2002, then the collapse of the 'thermostat' ability of the Arctic Ocean and now the repeated events in Antarctica. It's going very fast. The Arctic Ocean was crucial.
An Antarctic ice shelf has disappeared -scientists (click title to article - thank you)
Fri Apr 3, 2009 6:27pm EDT
...Climate change is to blame, according to the report from the U.S. Geological Survey and the British Antarctic Survey, available at pubs.usgs.gov/imap/2600/B."
The rapid retreat of glaciers there demonstrates once again the profound effects our planet is already experiencing -- more rapidly than previously known -- as a consequence of climate change," U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement....
