Carbon Footprints

Reuters is reporting Antarctic ice shelf set to collapse due to warming.

“We’ve come to the Wilkins Ice Shelf to see its final death throes,” David Vaughan, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), told Reuters after the first — and probably last — plane landed near the narrowest part of the ice.

“It really could go at any minute,” Vaughan said on slushy snow in bright sunshine beside a red Twin Otter plane that landed on skis. He added that the ice bridge could linger weeks or months.

The Wilkins once covered 16,000 sq km (6,000 sq miles). It has lost a third of its area but is still about the size of Jamaica or the U.S. state of Connecticut. Once the strip breaks up, the sea is likely to sweep away much of the remaining ice.

A year ago, BAS said the Wilkins was “hanging by a thread” after an aerial survey. “Miraculously we’ve come back a summer later and it’s still here. If it was hanging by a thread last year, it’s hanging by a filament this year,” Vaughan said.

Nine other shelves 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.

One by one these Ice Shelves are calving off and collapsing and yet some people still find it hard to accept that our planet is warming, and that it is our economic activity, our dirty generation of power, our clearing of forests, that is the primary cause of this warming. Hatemongers like Coal Industry hack Bob Carter still gets a good run in trashy Australian papers, preaching their sermons of ignorance and intolerance, and are probably still drawing a paycheque from the coal industry to do so. But the evidence is all around them. No amount of selective ‘cherry picking’ of facts can hide the obvious fact that on a global scale the ice is melting. The time to act is now. Delay will be measured in lost lives. — DS

Technorati Tags: Antarctic, British Antarctic Survey, Climate Change, global warming, ice shelf, meltdown, Wilkins

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 7:51 AM and is filed under Climate Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.