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Photos: Warming triggers massive Antarctic ice shelf collapse mongabay.com March 25, 2008 Satellites have captured the collapse of a massive ice shelf in Antarctica. At 160 square miles the area of collapsed ice was seven times the size of Manhattan. 
This image shows a high-resolution, enhanced-color image of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica on March 8, 2008. Narrow iceberg blocks (150 meters wide, or 492 feet) crumbled into house-sized rubble. Taiwan's Formosat-2 satellite acquired this image. Credit: Left, National Snow and Ice Data Center; right, National Snow and Ice Data Center/courtesy Cheng-Chien Liu, National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Taiwan and Taiwan's National Space Organization (NSPO); processed at Earth Dynamic System Research Center at NCKU, Taiwan.
"We believe the Wilkins has been in place for at least a few hundred years. But warm air and exposure to ocean waves are causing a break-up," said Ted Scambos, a scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder (NSIDC). Scambos first spotted the disintegration via NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and data from ICESat. While the collapse is dramatic, Scambos says it wouldn't trigger a rise in sea levels since the Wilkins Ice Shelf is a plate of floating ice. "The Wilkins disintegration won't raise sea level because it already floats in the ocean, and few glaciers flow into it," he said. "However, the collapse underscores that the Wilkins region has experienced an intense melt season. Regional sea ice has all but vanished, leaving the ice shelf exposed to the action of waves." Scambos adds that with the close of summer in the Antarctic, Wilkins is unlikely to further disintegrate in the next several months. "This unusual show is over for this season," Scambos said. "But come January, we'll be watching to see if the Wilkins continues to fall apart." This article is based on a news release from NSIDC
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