Taken together, this series of collapses suggests that some underlying environmental conditions, such as ocean and atmosphere temperatures, are changing. In East Antarctica, where Conger once was, Cook ice Shelf was partially lost in the 1970s. But in recent decades, scientists have seen several large ice shelves undergoing total disintegration.Īlong the Antarctic Peninsula, the whip-like land mass which extends from the West Antarctic mainland, these include Prince Gustav ice shelf (from 1989 to 1995), Larsen A ice shelf (1995), Larsen B (2002), and Wilkins ice shelf (2008 to 2009). The breaking and detachment of parts of ice shelves is a natural process: ice shelves generally go through cycles of slow growth punctuated by isolated calving events. Bertie Miles/US Geological Survey, Author provided The ice shelf had been slowly breaking apart for 50 years. When an ice shelf like Conger is lost, the grounded ice once kept behind the shelf may start to flow faster as the restraining force of the ice shelf is lost, resulting in more ice tumbling into the ocean.Ĭonger mapped from satellite images taken between 19. By restraining how much the grounded ice flows upstream, they can control the loss of ice from the interior of the sheet into the ocean. Smaller ice shelves are found where continental ice meets the sea in Greenland, northern Canada and the Russian Arctic. The world’s largest ice shelves fringe Antarctica, extending its ice sheet into the frigid Southern Ocean. Two calving events on March 5 and 7 reduced it further, detaching it from Bowman and precipitating its final collapse a week later. Since the beginning of satellite observations in the 1970s, the tip of the shelf had been disintegrating into icebergs in a series of what glaciologists call calving events.Ĭonger was already reduced to a 50km-long and 20km-wide strip attached to Antarctica’s vast continental ice sheet at one end and the ice-covered Bowman Island at the other. East Antarctica’s Conger ice shelf – a floating platform the size of Rome – broke off the continent on March 15, 2022.
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