An ice shelf as big as the city of Los Angeles melts in Antarctica

An ice barrier with an area equivalent to the city of The Angels totally melted last week in eastern Antarctica during the unprecedented “heat” wave that hit the region, scientists said Friday.

“Total collapse of the Conger ice shelf in East Antarctica on March 15 (about 1,200 km2),” said NASA scientist Catherine Colello Walker, posting satellite images of the event on her Twitter account.

This is roughly equivalent to the size of the cities of Los Angeles or Rome, which is still a long way from the largest icebergs.

This barrier located in the area known as Wilkes Land had begun to disintegrate several years ago, but last week it registered “its final collapse,” Jonathan Wille, of the Institute of Environmental Geosciences in Grenoble, France, told AFP, suggesting a ” relation” to the “unprecedented” heat wave that hit the frozen continent last week.

According to the National Ice Center, the US agency that monitors floating ice, the disintegration of that platform gave rise to an iceberg almost 30 km long and 18 km wide, called C38, which later broke into two pieces.

The formation of icebergs, known as calving, is a natural process, but warming air and oceans help speed it up, according to scientists.

AND “The collapse of the Conger barrier is more significant because it coincides with an extreme heat phenomenon” Peter Davis, an oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey research center, told AFP.

A “calving” does not necessarily mean the total disintegration of an ice shelf, the name given to the extension of glaciers over the sea.

It is not the first time that an Antarctic barrier has completely disintegrated. In 2002, the much larger Larsen B platform collapsed, but it was located on the Antarctic Peninsula, on the other side of the continent.

The Conger platform “may be smaller, but it is in East Antarctica, an area we thought was less vulnerable,” tweeted Andrew Mackintosh of Monash University in Australia. “This is a wake-up call,” he stressed.

The eastern part of the frozen continent, whose layer contains enough ice to raise sea levels by tens of meters, suffered an exceptional heat wave last week that surprised scientists, with temperatures up to 40°C above seasonal norms.

It is not possible at the time a phenomenon occurs to attribute it to climate change, but the intensification of heat waves is in line with the predictions of scientists.

In general, Antarctica, like the Arctic, is warming faster than the global average, which has risen by about +1.1°C since pre-industrial times.

“If this heat wave is a harbinger of future conditions in the region, then this delivery is highly significant and scientists will do their best to understand how these two events are related,” Peter Davis insisted.

Source-larepublica.pe