Canada's last intact ice shelf broke off. It took our research station with it

[marmar]

(Guardian UK) In August, Adrienne White – an ice analyst at the Canadian Ice Service who monitors the Canadian Arctic for changes in sea ice – was reviewing satellite imagery when she spotted something remarkable. The enormous Milne ice shelf, which was the last intact ice shelf in Canada and which White had studied closely before as a PhD student, was dissolving.

A huge chunk larger than Manhattan, roughly 43% of the shelf, broke off in one piece. And as it collapsed into the ocean, it took with it much of the equipment her former colleagues had left there.

“It is lucky that we were not on the ice shelf when this happened,” one colleague, Derek Mueller, wrote in a blogpost following the discovery. “Our camp area and instruments were all destroyed in this event.”

Mueller had been studying a channel that ran below the surface of the Milne ice shelf, like a river. In 2017, a team of researchers discovered scallops, sponges, worms and other organisms living some 20 meters deep, inside the ice shelf. Animals have been found living beneath ice shelves before, but never – to Mueller and his colleagues’ knowledge – inside of one. ...........(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/14/canadas-last-intact-ice-shelf-broke-off-it-took-our-research-station-with-it

[cilla4progress]

1. So fucking

heartbreaking.

Humans suck.