The total collapse of the Konger Ice Shelf in East Antarctica, March 15 [cerca de 1.200 km]The world has spoken NASACatherine Colello-Walker posted satellite images of the event to Twitter.
The surface is roughly the size of the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles in the United States or Rome in Italy, but it’s still far from the largest of the icebergs.
The platform located in the area known as Wilkesland began disintegrating many years ago, but last week recorded its “final collapse,” Jonathan Wylie of the Institute of Environmental Geosciences in Grenoble told AFP. An “unprecedented” heat wave swept the icy continent last week.
The US National Ice Center, an US agency that monitors floating Ice, says that this shelf was dissolved and gave rise to an iceberg of approximately 30 kilometers length and 18 kilometers width, called C38. It later split in two.
The formation of icebergs, known as “birth,” is a natural process, but the warming of the atmosphere and oceans is accelerating it, according to scientists.
“The collapse of the Konger ice sheet is more important because it coincides with an extreme heat phenomenon,” Peter Davis, an oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey, told AFP.
“Birth” does not necessarily mean the complete disintegration of the ice sheet, which is the name given to the stretch of glaciers above the sea.
This isn’t the first time that the Antarctic ice shelf has completely disintegrated. The Larsen B platform was larger than the Antarctic ice shelf, but it was located on the Antarctic Peninsula.
Andrew McIntosh of Monash University in Australia said on Twitter that the Konger platform “may be smaller, but it’s in East Antarctica, an area we thought was less vulnerable”. “This is a warning,” he stressed.
The east part of the frozen continent, which has enough ice in its mantle to raise sea level by tens or more meters, was struck last week by an unusual heat wave that stunned scientists. Temperatures reached 40 degrees Celsius higher than seasonal norms.
We cannot attribute climate change to a phenomenon that occurs. But the intensification of heat waves is in line with scientists’ predictions.
Antarctica, just like the Arctic is warming faster than average, with an increase in temperature of around +1.1 C from the pre-industrial period.
Peter Davis insisted that “if this heat wave is a harbinger of future conditions in the region, this ‘birth’ is very important and scientists will do their best to understand how these two events are related.”
(Video: IPCC report urges urgent and prompt action against the climate change effects.
