A big chunk of ice sheet has broken in the arctic.
NUNAVUT: The last intact ice shelf in the Canadian arctic has broken, with a slab of ice larger than Manhattan snapping off.
The Milne Ice Shelf, which lies at the edge of Ellesmere Island in the remote Canadian territory of Nunavut, has floated for thousands of years.
Researchers said it was now 40 per cent smaller after a 130 sq km chunk broke off the main shelf last month
.“It’s like standing on a building and seeing it break from top to bottom,” Luke Copland, a researcher at the University of Ottawa, said.Mr Copland said that global warming was “entirely” to blame for the collapse.
The area has warmed by 1C a decade since the 1960s, but this summer has been 5C warmer than the 30-year average.
“The combination of the long-term background warming plus the super hot summer is fatal for these ice shelves,” he said.
The Canadian Ice Service noted: “Above-normal air temperatures, offshore winds and open water in front of the ice shelf are all part of the recipe for ice shelf break-up
.”When it disintegrated, the ice shelf took with it a research camp and the northern hemisphere’s last known epishelf lake, a rare geographic feature, in which a freshwater lake, dammed by the ice shelf, floats on the ocean because fresh water has lower density than salt water.
It is home to a fascinating array of wildlife.“Unique life forms that we think exist in very few places on earth have been lost,” Mr Copland said.Researchers from the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in the US fear the Arctic ice caps could disappear by 2022.
