It is a sign of what might be coming, warn experts. 🧊
The images shared in the tweet show the shelf has been intact for a period of three months in January 2022 and is shattered like a piece of glass in the last couple of images, which were taken barely a week apart in March 2022. How is it different from previous collapses?
This is not the first time that the continent has seen an ice shelf disintegrate. In 2002, the Larsen B ice shelf, which had been stable for over 10,000 years collapsed. The shelf was three times bigger than Conger and compared to the size of the state of Rhode Island in the U.S. However, what makes the recent collapse significant is that the Conger ice shelf is located in the eastern part of Antarctica, a region considered as a massive, immovable, and cold block of ice by researchers so far. Peter Neff, a glaciologist told The Guardian that rates of ice loss were considered to be vastly different in the east as compared to theInterestingly, the Conger ice shelf had been shrinking gradually since the early 2000s.
It is likely that the sudden collapse was caused by the heatwave that East Antarctica witnessed last week. Temperatures in the region soared to 12 degrees Fahrenheit, which might seem low but is a good 40 degrees above the seasonal norm. While data of the collapse needs to be examined in detail, experts told The Guardian that the collapse was likely due to the surface melting of the shelf, just the way the Larsen B shelf had melted two decades ago.
With increasing global temperatures, more ice shelves are likely to break down in the future. Though the collapse of the Conger ice shelf is one of the most significant events in Antarctic history, the impact of the collapse would not be large as the glacier behind the shelf was relatively small. is about the size of Florida and is known among scientists as the doomsday glacier.
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