and Global Warming "needs more study". Riiiiiight......
Apparently, a giant ice shelf has snapped loose in the Arctic:A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada's Arctic, scientists said.Atually, my favorite quote in the entire article is "the remaining ice shelves are 90 per cent smaller than when they were first discovered in 1906." Boggles the mind. Yet more signs....The mass of ice broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometres south of the North Pole, but no one was present to see it in Canada's remote north.
Scientists using satellite images later noticed that it became a newly formed ice island in just an hour and left a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake.
Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, travelled to the newly formed ice island and could not believe what he saw.
"This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead," Vincent said today.
In 10 years of working in the region he has never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice, he said.
The collapse was so powerful that earthquake monitors 250 kilometres away picked up tremors from it.
The Ayles Ice Shelf, roughly 66 square kilometres in area, was one of six major ice shelves remaining in Canada's Arctic.
posted by JWL at
1:50 AM |
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