Antarctic ice shelf “hangs by a thread”
New evidence has emerged that a large plate of floating ice shelf attached to Antarctica is breaking up, in a troubling sign of global warming, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Thursday 10 July 2007.
Images taken by its Envisat remote-sensing satellite show that Wilkins Ice Shelf is “hanging by its last thread” to Charcot Island, one of the plate’s key anchors to the Antarctic peninsula, ESA said in a press release.
“Wilkins Ice Shelf is the most recent in a long, and growing, list of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula that are responding to the rapid warming that has occurred in this area over the last fifty years,” researcher David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said.
See March 08 Press Release
See Associated Press story
Note for picture editors. To obtain images of Wilkins Ice Shelf captured by British Antarctic Survey in March 2008 visit www.photo.antarctica.ac.uk search for keyword ‘Wilkins’