In three years time, the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica is breaking up.

First, the terminus was gone and resulted in the complete melting of the glacier as it hit the far warner water with every move to the ocean. Now, the glacier itself is breaking up and will melt far sooner than it has been melting. The more cracks in a glacier, the more warm air it is exposed to. This is a similar process that Greenland Ice is undergoing, except, this is the southern cap of Earth and not a glacier in the North Atlantic. Antarctica is more stable than Greenland because it's surroundings are far colder than the Arctic Ocean. The Arctic Ocean is down to new annual ice and not much more. It is succumbing to the heat in the troposphere created by anthropogenic greenhouse gas pollution.

June 12, 2021

By University of Washington

...These glaciers have attracted attention in recent decades (click here) as their ice shelves thinned because warmer ocean currents melted the ice’s underside. From the 1990s to 2009, Pine Island Glacier’s motion toward the sea accelerated from 2.5 kilometers per year to 4 kilometers per year (1.5 miles per year to 2.5 miles per year). The glacier’s speed then stabilized for almost a decade.

Results show that what’s happened more recently is a different process, Joughin said, related to internal forces on the glacier.

From 2017 to 2020, Pine Island’s ice shelf lost one-fifth of its area in a few dramatic breaks that were captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites, operated by the European Space Agency on behalf of the European Union. The researchers analyzed images from January 2015 to March 2020 and found that the recent changes on the ice shelf were not caused by processes directly related to ocean melting.

“The ice shelf appears to be ripping itself apart due to the glacier’s acceleration in the past decade or two,” Joughin said....

June 11, 2021

By Seth Borenstein

...That ice shelf has retreated by 12 miles (20 kilometers) (click here) between 2017 and 2020, according to a study in Friday’s Science Advances The crumbling shelf was caught on time-lapse video from a European satellite that takes pictures every six days.

The tearing apart are crevasses in the ice becoming larger both due to added hot air exposure and the weight of the glacier is no longer supported by the terminus. I spoke to this years ago on the blog. The supporting ice structures will melt and finally, the ice cap will melt and fall into the oceans causing coastal disruption. These are huge ice structures at either end of the planet and they are melting and becoming circulating water for as long as the ocean circulation continues.

DO NOT CONTINUE THE POLITICS OF THE PETROLEUM INDUSTRY.

“You can see stuff just tearing apart,” said study lead author Ian Joughin, a University of Washington glaciologist. “So it almost looks like the speed-up itself is weakening the glacier. ... And so far we’ve lost maybe 20% of the main shelf.”...