Before-and-after PICS: Antarctic sea ice at record low as NASA captures massive glacier-break

[The Ga[M]er.]

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently revealed beautiful but frightening images of a huge area of ice breaking off from the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica. 

"The Larsen Ice Shelf is situated along the northeastern coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, one of the fastest-warming places on the planet," they say. "In the past three decades, two large sections of the ice shelf have collapsed. A third section seems like it may be on a similar trajectory, with a new iceberg poised to break away soon."

Pine Island is one of the main glaciers responsible for moving ice from the interior of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to the ocean. 

This as the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) also released a statement confirming that the sea ice around Antarctica has shrunk to the smallest annual extent on record. 

Ice floating around the frozen continent usually melts to its smallest for the year around the end of February, at the peak of the southern hemisphere summer, before expanding again as the autumn chill sets in.

SEE PICS: Climate change is causing Antarctic snows to shrink

This year, however, the sea ice extent contracted to 2.287 million square kilometres on 13 February, pointing to the lowest it has even been recorded in the 38-year satellite record. 

The new record-low is but a fraction smaller than a previous low of 2.290 million square kilometres, which was recorded on 27 February 1997, but confirms the intensifying on global warming. 

Take a look: 

According to Ian Howat, a glaciologist at Ohio State University, this ice-calving event was about 10 times smaller than in July 2015, when a 30-kilometre-long rift developed below the ice surface, then broke through and calved an iceberg spanning 583 square kilometres. 

 

“I think this event is the calving equivalent of an ‘aftershock’ following the much bigger event,” Howat says. “Apparently, there are weaknesses in the ice shelf—just inland of the rift that caused the 2015 calving—that are resulting in these smaller breaks.”

 

NASA says they've detected several more rifts on the Pine Island glacier not far from where it meets the sea, and they expect they will contribute to future break-offs before long.

"[It] fits into the larger picture of basal crevasses in the center of the ice shelf being eroded by warm ocean water, causing the ice shelf to break from the inside out," Howat says.

Take a look at how the landscape of Antarctica has changed since February 2014: