…Gone

Since I posted 12 hours ago on the imminent demise of a large chunk of the Wilkins ice shelf, new ESA imagery shows that it has finally collapsed into a shattered mass of icebergs — roughly centre of this image. The BBC has the story, together with comments from David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey. Loss of this “pin” could destabilise even more of the shelf — look at the large cracks bottom right…

[Update: see also Times Online, and the DomPost story has this quote from Prof Tim Naish of VUW’s Antarctic Research Centre: “It’s a consequence of global warming. Antarctica is behaving in a very strange way, bits of it are cooling and bits of it are warming. Our deep time records tell us that these ice shelves are the early warning signals; when they go, then we see quite dramatic and unstable changes in the ice sheets and glaciers feeding them.”

There have been a lot of new units of area invoked: Wilkins is as big as Connecticut, Jamaica, and almost half the size of Wales. But which half? Is Cardiff safe? 😉 ]