European Space Agency: Antarctica’s Wilkins Ice Shelf "Under Threat" from Warming

Scientists closely monitoring the Antarctica Peninsula have just reported new rifts on the Wilkins Ice Shelf that make it dangerously close to breaking away from the continent entirely -- and becoming a free-floating iceberg the size of Connecticut.

The rate of the melt is alarming -- some 15 years ahead of scientific projections.

The researchers, who are from the European Space Agency (ESA), reported the implications on the agency's website:

If the ice shelf breaks away from the peninsula, it will not cause a rise in sea level since it is already floating. However, ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula are sandwiched by extraordinarily raising surface air temperatures and a warming ocean, making them important indicators for on-going climate change.

In other words, warming air and seas and have caused the disintegration of the Wilkins Ice Shelf and other such shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula. They now act as an important early warning system for climate change in other parts of the globe.

According to the ESA, The Antarctica Peninsula has been experiencing "extraordinary warming" over the past 50 years of about 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit each decade -- more than any other place on Earth. The effect of that, via The Christian Science Monitor, back in March:

Two of the 10 shelves along the [Antarctic] peninsula have vanished within the past 30 years. Another five have lost between 60 percent and 92 percent of their original extent. Of the 10, Wilkins is the southernmost shelf in the area to start buckling under global warming's effects.

Wilkins began vanishing in the 1990s.

The shelf is connected to two Antarctic islands -- Charcot and Latady -- by a narrow finger of ice. That crumbling "ice bridge" has already lost well over 2,000 square kilometers (about 772 square miles) of ice this year.

In July 2008, ESA announced that the bridge was breaking up quickly in the dead of the South Hemisphere winter, to their great astonishment. The ESA has said that it will publish an update about the status of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in "the event of a break-up."

Expect news soon.

And when it hits, it will be a disquieting reminder of the kinds of quantum changes we are about to witness from climate change, and of the urgency with which governments need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In the meantime, two weeks of UN climate talks have kicked off in Poznan, Poland -- in what will surely be a stark reminder of the challenges of real-world policymaking on the climate issue.

Further reading from ESA:

Wilkins Ice Shelf hanging by its last thread

Even the Antarctic winter cannot protect Wilkins Ice Shelf

Further break-up of Antarctic ice shelf

Satellites witness lowest Arctic ice coverage in history

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