Even The Antarctic Winter Cannot Protect Wilkins Ice Shelf

June 14th, 2008

The Wilkin’s ice shelf is a broad plate of floating ice south of South America on the Antarctic Peninsula, is connected to two islands, Charcot and Latady. In February 2008, an area of about 400 km² broke off from the ice shelf, narrowing the connection down to a 6 km strip; this latest event in May has further reduced the strip to just 2.7 km.

If you watched Al Gore’s “documentary” An Inconvenient Truth you are probably quite familiar with the reduction of these large ice shelves. Whether you think his video is hogwash (overall I do…lol) this is certainly something that is monitored very closely. Evidence shows that these shelves are indeed deteriorating like a belly on Phentermine.

According to Dr Matthias Braun from the Center for Remote Sensing of Land Surfaces, Bonn University, and Dr Angelika Humbert from the Institute of Geophysics, Münster University, who have been investigating the dynamics of Wilkins Ice Shelf for months, this break-up has not yet finished.

“The remaining plate has an arched fracture at its narrowest position, making it very likely that the connection will break completely in the coming days,” Braun and Humbert said.