Go to Original
Broken Ice in Antarctica
The New York Times | Editorial
Friday 28 March 2008
Winter is coming to Antarctica, and that may be the only thing that keeps another
of its major ice shelves from collapsing. On Tuesday, scientists from the British
Antarctic Survey announced that there had been an enormous fracture on the edge
of the Wilkins ice shelf, which started breaking last month.
That province of ice, a body of permanent floating ice about the size of Connecticut,
lies on the western edge of the Antarctic Peninsula, the part of the continent
regarded as most vulnerable to climate change. Scientists flew over the break
- itself covering some 160 square miles - and what they saw is remarkable:
huge, geometrically fractured slabs of ice and, among them, the rubble of a
catastrophic breach. A great swath of the ice shelf is being held in place by
a thin band of ice.
What matters isn't just the scale of this breakout. Changes in wind patterns
and water temperatures related to global warming have begun to erode the ice
sheets of western Antarctica at a faster rate than previously detected, and
the total collapse of the Wilkins ice shelf is now within the realm of possibility.
It also comes as a reminder that the warming of Earth's surface is occurring
much faster at the poles than it is in more temperate regions. It is easy to
think of ice as somehow temporary, but scientists say that the Wilkins ice shelf
may have been in place for at least several hundred years.
Nothing dramatizes the urgency of global warming quite like a fracture of this
scale. There is nothing to be done about a collapsing polar ice sheet except
to witness it. It may be too late to stop the warming decay at the boundaries
of Antarctic ice, yet there is everything to be done. Humans can radically change
the way they live and do business, knowing that it is the one chance to find
a possible limit to radical change in the natural world around us.
-------
Jump to today's Truthout Features:
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on TO may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.
Print This Story
E-mail This Story