Saturday, December 30, 2006

Immense ice shelf breaks off in Canadian Arctic

Yahoo! News
Immense ice shelf breaks off in Canadian Arctic

An enormous ice shelf broke away from Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, researchers said, warning it could be another symptom of global warming.

The 66-square-kilometer (25.5-square-mile) ice island tore away from Ellesmere, a huge strip of land in the Canadian Arctic close to Greenland.

The actual break took place in August 2005 and was detected by sensors 250 kilometers (155 miles) away, but at the time no one was able to pinpoint what had happened.

The Canadian Ice Service contacted geographer Luke Copland at the University of Ottawa, who was able to reconstruct the chain of events by piecing together seismic data and satellite images supplied by Canada and the United States.

"This loss is the biggest in 25 years, but it continues the loss that occurred within the last century," Copland told AFP, noting that ice cover was down by 90 percent since this area was discovered in 1906.

"What is important and interesting is that it is sudden, quite large even. In the past, we looked to climate change (and) thought perhaps ice shelves ... would just melt apart by losing a little piece day by day, but it now seems that when you reach some kind of threshold, when you reach that level, the whole thing just breaks apart."