The Delaware-sized piece of ice finally broke away from Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf sometime in the last few days, becoming one of the largest icebergs on record.
Scientists first spotted signs of a crack in the Larsen C shelf in 2014. That crack grew rapidly in the last year and finally gave way sometime between Monday and Wednesday, according to scientists.
There are two important details about Larsen C iceberg’s breaking off: It probably won’t have an immediate impact on sea levels and it’s likely the result of natural processes, not global warming.
The event reduced the size of the Larsen C shelf by 12 percent, according to the MIDAS Project scientists who have been monitoring the break up via satellites. Larsen C is a floating ice sheet attached to the Antarctic Peninsula.
Scientists will continue to monitor the stability of Larsen C ice sheet, and follow the movement of the glacier to see if it breaks into smaller pieces. Larsen C is between 600 and 1,800 feet thick, and the new iceberg weighs about a trillion tons.
“Although this is a natural event, and we’re not aware of any link to human-induced climate change, this puts the ice shelf in a very vulnerable position,” Martin O’Leary, a Swansea University glaciologist and MIDAS team member, said in a statement.
“This is the furthest back that the ice front has been in recorded history. We’re going to be watching very carefully for signs that the rest of the shelf is becoming unstable,” O’Leary said.
The Larsen C iceberg, however, is only about half the size of the Ross iceberg that broke away in 2002. That iceberg was 4,200 square miles, and made its way past New Zealand around 2006.
Even though icebergs are nothing new in the South Pole, some scientists and media outlets took the opportunity to warn how ice sheets could be broken up more quickly in the future due to man-made warming.
“The demise of ice shelves in the Peninsula is well-documented and related to climate warming,” Eric Rignot, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Mashable.
Rignot has previously warned about instability in the West Antarctic ice sheet, arguing that global warming makes the situation more dire for future sea level rise. He said more warming will push more land ice into the sea, fueling sea level rise.
“This is the big story that people need to think about,” Rignot said. “What we are seeing right now does not have major consequences for sea level tomorrow, but it is part of a story where the sources of sea level awakened by climate warming get bigger and bigger with time.”
The Larsen C ice shelf sits on the edge of the Antarctic Peninsula and holds back glaciers from reaching the sea. The Larsen A and B ice shelves broke up in 1995 and 2002, respectively. Scientists have been especially concerned with warming in the Antarctic Peninsula.
The Washington Post’s Chris Mooney noted that while iceberg calving is a normal process, “Larsen C is the next ice shelf in line in a southward progression that has previously seen the collapse of the Larsen A and Larsen B ice shelves, making this occurrence at least suspicious.”
The Guardian’s Nicola Davis for some reason mentioned the “news of the giant iceberg comes after US president Donald Trump announced that the US will be withdrawing from the 2015 Paris climate accord.” As if the two events are related.
Interestingly enough, The Guardian published a piece in late June that countered the prevailing media narrative about the Larsen C iceberg.
The Larsen C ice shelf rift if “like a dozen other rifts observed in Antarctica before,” wrote professor Helen Amanda Fricker of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who argued the “enormous loss is just ordinary housekeeping for this part of Antarctica.”
“Glaciologists are not alarmed about most of these processes; they are examples of Antarctica simply doing what we know Antarctica has done for thousands of years,” Fricker wrote.
“The situation is a conundrum: we want people to be aware of Antarctica and concerned about what might happen there in the near future as climate changes,” Fricker wrote. “But hyping research results to sound like climate change, when they are just improved understanding of natural behaviour, is misleading.”
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