Earth Watch Report - Climate Change
Pine Island Glacier - Oct. 2, 2011Credit: DRL.The
floating part of the Pine Island Glacier just before the first crack
appeared. The flow direction is from the lower right corner to the upper
left one. One can see the ice in bright colors, the ocean's surface in
darker ones.
Pine Island Glacier - May 11, 2012Credit: DRL.A
second crack has produced an iceberg that is 30 square kilometer big
and enclosed by the bigger iceberg, which is still attached to the ice
shelf.
Pine Island Glacier - July 8, 2013Credit: DLR.On the left handside the newly formed isberg with the a size of 720 square kilometres is visible.
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| 10.07.2013 | Climate Change | Antarctica | [Pine Island Glacier] |  |  |
Climate Change in Antarctica on Wednesday, 10 July, 2013 at 10:15 (10:15 AM) UTC.
| Description | |
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Pine Island Glacier (PIG), the longest and fastest flowing glacier
in the Antarctic, has spawned a huge iceberg. The block measures about
720 sq km in area - roughly eight times the size of Manhattan Island in
New York. Scientists have been waiting for the PIG to calve since
October 2011 when they first noticed a spectacular crack spreading
across its surface. Confirmation that the fissure had extended the full
width of the glacier was obtained on Monday. It was seen by the German
TerraSAR-X satellite. This carries a radar instrument that can detect
the surface of the ice stream even though the Antarctic is currently in
the grip of winter darkness. The berg that broke away was part of the
PIG's ice shelf - the front segment of the glacier that lifts up and
floats as it pushes out into the ocean. The shelf will reach tens of km
beyond the grounding line. German researchers have been receiving images
from TerraSAR-X every three days or so, hoping to understand better the
processes that drive the glacier forward and prompt it to fracture.
This will help them improve the computer models that are used to
forecast future changes in the Antarctic. "We were very keen to see how
the crack propagated," said Prof Angelika Humbert, a glaciologist with
the Alfred Wegener Institute. "We need proper calving laws, to be able
to describe the evolution of ice sheets over centuries," she told BBC
News. Very big tabular bergs will come off the end of the ice shelf every 6-10 years. Previous notable events occurred in 2007 and 2001. It is a very natural process and scientists say it should not be tied directly to the very real climate changes that are also affecting this part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Satellite and airborne measurements have recorded a marked thinning and a surge in velocity of the PIG in recent decades. This has been attributed in part to warmer waters getting under, and melting, the ice shelf. The PIG's grounding line has pulled back further and further towards the land. The glacier's behaviour means it is now under close scrutiny, not least because it drains something like 10% of all the ice flowing off the west of the continent. "The PIG is the most rapidly shrinking glacier on the planet," explained Prof David Vaughan from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). "It's losing more ice than any other glacier on the planet, and it's contributing to sea level rise faster than any other glacier on the planet. That makes it worthy of study." BAS has recently deployed a series of instrumented "javelins" along the PIG to monitor its movement. When the big crack propagating across the 30km width of the PIG was first photographed in 2011 by a Nasa airborne expedition, many assumed the moment of final calving would come quite quickly. That it took almost two years for the tabular berg to break away is something of a surprise, concedes Prof Humbert. What should not be a surprise, she says, is that it has occurred in deep winter when the ocean is covered in sea-ice. This relatively thin covering would always be overwhelmed by the internal stresses in the massive ice shelf. What will be interesting now, she adds, is to see how long it takes for the berg to move out of the bay in front of it. It could take several months. TerraSAR-X will provide the tell-tale data. The world's largest recorded iceberg was the tabular block that became known as B-15. When it broke off the Ross Ice Shelf in 2001, it had a surface area of about 11,000 sq km. It took years to melt away as it moved out into the Southern Ocean. |
National Geographic
Giant Crack in Antarctica About to Spawn New York-Size Iceberg
"This glacier is really important," adds mightily to sea level rise, experts say.
Pine Island Glacier's vast crack, pictured via NASA satellite late last fall.
Image courtesy NASA/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS
Published February 2, 2012
With a gargantuan crack slowly splitting it apart, Antarctica's fastest-melting glacier is about to lose a chunk of ice larger than all of New York City, scientists say.
(Also see "Manhattan-Size Ice Island Cracks in Half.")
The crevasse stretches 19 miles (30 kilometers) long and up to 260 feet (80 meters) wide, as shown in a picture taken by NASA's Terra satellite in October and featured this week as a NASA Image of the Day.
Snaking across the floating tongue of the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica, the crack is expected to create an iceberg 350 square miles (907 square kilometers)—versus 303 square miles (785 square kilometers) for Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx combined, according to NASA.
As for when the iceberg might shove off, "that is very difficult to predict," said oceanographer Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, "but in the coming months for sure."
Glacier "Contributing Most to Sea Level"
Usually there's nothing extraordinary about a glacier calving, said glaciologist Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado.
Glaciers that flow into the sea, like the Pine Island Glacier, go through a normal cycle in which the floating section grows, stresses mount, and an iceberg breaks off, Scambos said.
"That is nothing unusual in most cases."
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