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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (131030)	3/25/2008 8:08:11 PM
From: T L Comiskey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 362382

Antarctica's Wilkins Ice Shelf Risks Collapse, U.K. Group Says By Alex Morales March 25 (Bloomberg) -- An Antarctic ice shelf bigger than Connecticut risks collapse because of global warming after a retreat that began on Feb. 28, the British Antarctic Survey said. The Wilkins ice shelf, which lost 1,000 square kilometers (390 square miles) of ice, or about 6 percent of its surface, in 1998, calved another 570 square kilometers since February, the survey group said in an e-mailed statement. Now, there's little to stop the loss of another several thousand square kilometers. ``The rest seems to be held a bit by a thread,'' David Vaughan, a scientist at the group who in 1993 predicted Wilkins would break apart within 30 years, said today in a telephone interview from Cambridge, England. ``We predicted it would happen, but it's happened twice as fast as we predicted.'' The collapse of Wilkins would have few implications for sea levels because it's already floating and doesn't hold back large land-based glaciers, Vaughan said. Still, it may foreshadow future melting in the southern continent, which combined with Greenland holds enough ice to raise sea levels by 64 meters. ``The importance of it is it's further south than any ice shelf we've seen retreating before, it's bigger than any ice shelf we've seen retreating before and in the long term it could be a taste of other things to come if climate change continues in the Antarctic,'' Vaughan said. `Intense Melt' Wilkins, which is in the Antarctic Peninsula, a finger of the continent that points up toward South America, isn't the first ice shelf to retreat. In 2002, the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed, with 500 billion tons of ice breaking up into icebergs in less than a month. Other shelves that have collapsed in the past 30 years include Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Wordie, Muller and Jones, according to the survey group. The latest break was first observed by Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Center in Boulder, Colorado, according to the British Antarctic Survey. ``The collapse underscores that the Wilkins region has experienced an intense melt season,'' Scambos said in a separate statement e-mailed by the NSIDC. ``Regional sea ice has all but vanished, leaving the ice shelf exposed to the action of waves.'' Scambos alerted the U.K. group, which monitored satellite imagery and sent a reconnaissance plane to the area. ``We flew along the main crack and observed the sheer scale of movement from the breakage,'' Jim Elliott, who filmed the breakage from the plane, said in the statement. ``Big hefty chunks of ice, the size of small houses, look as though they've been thrown around like rubble -- it's like an explosion.'' With the Antarctic summer drawing to a close, there's a chance the ice shelf -- which now covers about 14,500 square kilometers -- may survive for another year, Vaughan said. There's also a chance it may collapse over the next few weeks, he said. ``We could see the loss of maybe another half of the ice shelf,'' Vaughan said. ``The Antarctic Peninsula is warming much more rapidly than anywhere else in Antarctic.'' To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.net. Last Updated: March 25, 2008 12:46 EDT