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posted by martyb on Friday July 14 2017, @10:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the breaking-up-is-hard-to-do dept.

It's finally adrift. When the Larsen C Ice Shelf calved yesterday [Wednesday], it sent one of the largest icebergs ever recorded slipping into a sea frosted with smaller chunks of ice. It marked the end of a decades-long splintering first seen by satellites in the 1960s. The crack stayed small for years until, in 2014, it began racing across the Antarctic ice.

The massive iceberg holds twice as much water used in the United States every year, according to calculations by Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute. It weighs about 1.1 trillion tons and measures 2,200 square miles. Its volume is twice that of Lake Erie.

"The iceberg is one of the largest recorded, and its future progress is difficult to predict," said Adrian Luckman of Wales' Swansea University, who led a project tracking the crack since 2015. "It may remain in one piece but is more likely to break into fragments. Some of the ice may remain in the area for decades, while parts of the iceberg may drift north into warmer waters."

By mass, the iceberg accounts for 12 percent of the Larsen C Ice Shelf. It's large enough that maps will have to be redrawn. Larsen C was the fourth-largest ice shelf in the world. Now it's the fifth.

In this particular political moment, the calving of a major iceberg has made headlines around the world. Environmental groups connected the event to climate change and the Trump administration's withdrawal from the Paris climate accords. But scientists have cautioned that the story of the iceberg, which will be known as A68, is more nuanced. Climate signals are not clear enough to attribute the event to rising levels of carbon dioxide, but human activity may have contributed to its calving nonetheless.

https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060057298

Previously:
Larsen C Calves Trillion Ton Iceberg
Larsen C Rift Branches as it Comes Within 5 km of Calving
Delaware-Sized Iceberg Could Break Off of Antarctica at Any Moment


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday July 14 2017, @02:32PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday July 14 2017, @02:32PM (#539123) Homepage
    > http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-worlds-largest-iceberg-is-...

    OK, well that's a cunty URL. Once you've got to the page the headline is the more restrained "One Of The World’s Largest Icebergs Is ...", but still, there's no excuse for a flat out lie in the URL.

    However what's crazy about the commondreams one? It is accurately reporting that there's a group campaigning for shame-laden iceberg naming - that's a fact. It also carries quotes from real relevant scientists (i.e. glaciologists, not just random me-too climate bandw^H^H^H^H^Hscientists) with such scare-mongery sensationalism as "Large calving events such as this are normal processes of a healthy ice sheet, ..."
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