Antarctic ice shelf set to collapse due to warming - Reuters

[Eugene]

Source: Reuters

Antarctic ice shelf set to collapse due to warming
Tue Jan 20, 2009 8:42am EST

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

WILKINS ICE SHELF, Antarctica (Reuters) - A huge
Antarctic ice shelf is on the brink of collapse with
just a sliver of ice holding it in place, the latest
victim of global warming that is altering maps of the
frozen continent.

"We've come to the Wilkins Ice Shelf to see its final
death throes," David Vaughan, a glaciologist at the
British Antarctic Survey (BAS), told Reuters after
the first -- and probably last -- plane landed near
the narrowest part of the ice.

The flat-topped shelf has an area of thousands of
square kilometers, jutting 20 meters (65 ft) out of
the sea off the Antarctic Peninsula.

But it is held together only by an ever-thinning
40-km (25-mile) strip of ice that has eroded to an
hour-glass shape just 500 meters wide at its
narrowest.

In 1950, the strip was almost 100 km wide.

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Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE50I4G520090120