Manhattan-Sized Ice Chunk Breaks Free in Canadian Arctic
Another whopping chunk of ice has broken free from Ellesmere Island in Canada’s northern Arctic. This Markham Ice Shelf, just one of five remaining shelves in the Canadian Arctic region, split away sometime in August. The shelf is gianormous. It’s 19-square miles, around the size of Manhattan, and now adrift in the Arctic Ocean. In addition, two other large chunks – totaling about 47 square miles – split off from the Serson Ice Shelf reducing it about 60 percent.
Derek Mueller, an Arctic ice shelf specialist at Trent University in Ontario, told The Associated Press this:
“The Markham Ice Shelf was a big surprise because it suddenly disappeared. We went under cloud for a bit during our research and when the weather cleared up, all of a sudden there was no more ice shelf. It was a shocking event that underscores the rapidity of changes taking place in the Arctic”
The Markham Ice Shelf is about 4,500 years old and this news comes on the heels of unusual cracks in a northern Greenland glacier, rapid melting of a southern Greenland glacier, and a near record loss for Arctic sea ice this summer. Plus earlier this year a 160-square mile chunk of an Antarctic ice shelf disintegrated. Fact is, Arctic temperatures have risen faster than the global average in recent decades due to global warming:
“These changes are irreversible under the present climate and indicate that the environmental conditions that have kept these ice shelves in balance for thousands of years are no longer present,” Mueller said in an e-mailed statement from the research team sent late on Tuesday.
During the last century, when ice shelves would break off, thick sea ice would eventually reform in their place.
“Reduced sea ice conditions and unusually high air temperatures have facilitated the ice shelf losses this summer, and extensive new cracks across remaining parts of the largest remaining ice shelf, the Ward Hunt, mean that it will continue to disintegrate in the coming years.” said Luke Copland, director of the Laboratory for Cryospheric Research at the University of Ottawa. “We have now reached a threshold where the environment is too warm for these ice shelves to exist anymore,”
These ice shelves contain many unique ecosystems that have yet to be studied. This is an opportunity lost because of how long these shelves take to form. This is just another horrifying reminder of how the climate crisis is rapidly effecting both the Arctic and us.
Related Posts:
Arctic Breakup Growing Each Week
Giant Cracks Appearing in Arctic Ice
Arctic Ice in Battle for its Life
Image source: nick_russill on Flickr
Just think of the future of arctic tourism! Nome Tropicana, drinks are free!
(oh ghod, we’re all fried)
True, humanity has survived the changes of the millennium, but not without great pains! The changes we see now, combined with shortages of oil in the world and humanities unwillingness to relinquish the current “Status Quo” indicate the end of at least one recent and anomalous situation, the development in the past two hundred years of the great hulking American Neanderthal in the America’s. This beast, force fed by capitalism, corporatism, and greed to exploit the easiest resources of the America’s for highest ROI, is larger, bigger bones not found even in all the antiquity, highest caloric intake for survival of all mankind, requires today, a full 80% of all mankind’s resources to survive, and has run out of easy resources for fast ROI gains and find himself relegated to “Legacy Worker” unemployable , where once he was treasured, and facing extinction as an unsustainable, unemployable in the new computer driven electro / hydraulic age of endeavor. A smarter, smaller, better educated, light bodied, Asian, vegan, hoard have stolen his manufacturing prowess, his heavy industries, his economy, his dollar, his leadership position as the educated of the world, and have reduced his great cities to rubble SEE: http://uprooted.jessicareeder.com/2009/09/detroit-and-the-100-dollar-house/comment-page-1/#comment-3003 through trade, in only a few decades. He stands now, habituated, dependent in his unsustainable state on the brink of collapse, economically militarily, morally, and is rapidly relegated to “Third World” status by his masters, the capitalists, corporatists, who see him as a disposible commodity, left without basic health care, sent by one way bus tickets from New York City to the boondocks, slums, poorer countrysides of his nation, lives in Hoovervilles, Shanty Towns, Tent cities, village edges in tar paper shacks, and scavenges for food, and dies their scratching in garden plots, humanured, composted to fertility, in a futile attempt to maintain himself. This modern day reality is the clear sign of a great convulsive paradigm shift in the America’s and will end in massively reduced consumption of energy, and a release of the foodstuffs it now consumes, back to the rest of the world, creating surpluses their, then adjustment to lower production levels, as no more of America’s cheap and bountiful resources will be forthcoming, thus “damping down” the rate of degradation of Mother Natures balances, and even a reversal of current trends. Much to the chagrin of this great ape, his demise will be in the next decade, and as the once great U.S.S.R. fell, his songs of his own great glory will be heard, echoing off the walls of Hell as that great chasm closes over his head, and the world will marvel, much as they do over the remains of Empire in Russia, over the rubble that was once the Great invincible U.S.A. To the relief of environmentalists everywhere, the icecaps will, in time, return, as Mother Nature re-balances after this anomaly, this small fragment in her time, The great Hulking American Neanderthal!