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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TideGlider who wrote (24074)	3/26/2008 6:35:14 PM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 224749

This is the eighth Antarctic ice shelf collapse in the past 30 years. All have occurred on the Antarctic Peninsula, which reaches 1,000 miles into the Southern Ocean towards Cape Horn and is far more exposed to warming ocean and air temperatures than is Antarctica's continental interior. The peninsula's mean temperature has, in fact, been rising faster than anywhere on Earth over the past half-century, at half a degree celsius per decade, while there is evidence that mean temperature at the South Pole is actually falling. But the Wilkins shelf is the most southerly to succumb to climate change so far. The damage that it has sustained in the past month will slow during the Antarctic winter but can only accelerate next year. As it shrinks, so will its effectiveness as a buffer between the ocean and the interior. Most troubling of all, the suddenness of the loss of an area the size of the Isle of Man has caused scientists to revise their estimate of the remaining lifespan of the shelf as a whole, from thirty years to ten. timesonline.co.uk