ICE CUBE BREAKS FREE!!!!!
Giant Ice Cube Breaks Free in Antarctica
By PETER JAMES SPIELMANN
.c The Associated Press
SYDNEY, Australia (April 17) - A 75-square-mile chunk of ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula snapped off sometime earlier this year, scientists said today. They blamed global warming.
Satellite images of the Larsen B ice shelf, which reaches toward South America, show the section broke away between Feb. 26 and March 23 as the Antarctic summer turned to winter, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.
In January 1995, the Larsen A ice shelf to the north broke away in a 48 mile-by-23 mile mass, 600 feet thick.
The British Antarctic Survey has predicted the entire Larsen Ice Shelf, which covers more than 4,000 square miles, is nearing its limit of stability.
The ice shelf collapse is consistent with ''what we see from the effects of increased greenhouse gases, which cause warming,'' said Bill Budd, a meteorology professor at Australia's Antarctic Cooperative Research Center.
''And it's the warming in the ocean that is most important for the reduction in the ice shelves,'' he said. ''It is the melting from underneath that can be much more effective than warming of the air.''
Over the past 50 years, the Antarctic Peninsula has experienced a sustained atmospheric warming of 4.5 degrees.
Research by Budd and his colleagues indicates global warming will melt most of the ice shelves, which border about 44 percent of Antarctica and cover 580,000 square miles.
Budd's computer climate models predict significant degradation of the ice shelves beginning in the 21st century and their near-total loss within 500 years.
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