70-Mile-Long Crack Opens Up in Antarctica

Num7

Num7

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An ominous crack in an Antarctic ice shelf as wide as a football field is long takes on an otherworldly beauty in a new aerial image.

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Snapped by scientists on NASA's IceBridge mission, the shot shows a rift in Larsen C, an ice shelf that is floating off the Antarctic Peninsula. When the crack eventually spreads across the entire ice shelf, it will create an iceberg the size of the state of Delaware, according to IceBridge. That's around 2,491 square miles (6,451 square kilometers).

As of Nov. 10, when the IceBridge scientists observed this crack, it was 70 miles (112 km) long and more than 300 feet (91 meters) wide. The dark depths of the crack plunge down about a third of a mile (0.5 km), all the way through the ice to the ocean below. [See More Gorgeous Antarctic Images from IceBridge]

According to NASA Ice, an Earth sciences program at NASA, this rift is relatively new — it showed growth on satellite imagery just this year. The U.K.-based Antarctic research group the MIDAS Project first observed the rift in 2014 and has been tracking it ever since.

Larsen C is Antarctica's fourth-largest ice shelf, and it holds back the land-based glaciers just behind it: Once the ice shelf goes, those slow-flowing glaciers have one less barrier in their journey toward the sea. In 2002, the nearby ice shelf Larsen B partially collapsed after showing similar rifting, NASA's Earth Observatory reported earlier this year, when it showed the collapse alongside a satellite image of the growing Larsen C crevasse.

According to the MIDAS Project, the eventual calving of the Delaware-size sheet of ice would remove between 9 percent and 12 percent of Larsen C's surface area and may lead to the crumbling of the entire ice shelf.

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70-Mile-Long Crack Opens Up in Anatarctica
 
Opmmur

Opmmur

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Not a good thing for a Large block of Ice to melt in warmer waters the size of Delaware.
 

Opmmur

Opmmur

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Polar ice the size of India has melted into the sea, scientists say

http://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/to...ern-northeastern-us/ar-AAlaK9N?ocid=DELLDHP15
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© Provided by CBS Interactive Inc.

As global temperatures continue to rise and break records, polar sea ice covering an area about the size of India has vanished, according to climate scientists. The trend of polar ice melt has been alarming researchers, with sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctica being measured at record lows for this time of year, Reuters reports.

“There are some really crazy things going on,” Mark Serreze, director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, told the news service.

Serreze said temperatures in regions of the Arctic, for instance, were 36 degrees Fahrenheit above average on some days last month.

Beyond that, the NSIDC satellite measurements show that on Dec. 4, the extent of polar sea ice was 1.48 million square miles below the 1981-2010 average. That amounts to about the size of India, or for another point of reference, two Alaskas.

The latest measurements appear to reverse a trend of expanding Antarctic sea ice, which some skeptics cited to contradict evidence of climate change.

A number of factors may be contributing, including warmer waters in the Pacific from this year’s El Nino weather event, the report said.

Scientists say man-made global warming also played a major role.

This of course has been viewed as a major global crisis for world leaders. With last year’s Paris climate agreement, nearly 200 governments agreed to curb carbon emissions with the goal of keeping the world’s temperature increase to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above the global average temperature before the Industrial Revolution.

It remains unclear whether the U.S. commitment to that deal will be honored by President-elect Donald Trump, who has previously called climate change a “hoax” and stated he might want to pull out of the Paris agreement. Mr. Trump backtracked somewhat in November, telling the New York Times that he has an “open mind” when it comes to climate change.

Mr. Trump and Ivanka Trump held meetings with Al Gore Monday at Trump Tower to discuss the issue of climate change. Gore characterized his talk with the president-elect as “very productive” and “a sincere search for areas of common ground.”

Those meetings came as Antarctica’s sea ice measured 4.33 million square miles — its smallest for early December, effectively beating 1982’s record, NSIDC reports. Similarly, sea ice in the Arctic, though expanding for the winter, hit a record low of 3.96 million square miles this season, below 2006’s record.

All of this is “an extraordinary departure from the norm,” Anders Levermann, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told Reuters.

Scientists worry that these developments could have a domino effect. As sea ice melts, glaciers could collapse more quickly into their surrounding waters, potentially increasing the rate of sea level rise rapidly.

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© Mario Tama, Getty Images polar-ice.jpg
 
Sassified

Sassified

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That's not good. Seems all kinds of natural events are happening all over the world and getting worse. Not just Antarctica. Massive sink holes swallowing people, cars and houses up, increase in earthquakes, weather getting stranger and stranger by the day, weird things happening in space with all the planets the moon and sun, etc. I think we all will be in for some major catastrophic events happening in the very near future and are heading for a major shock with the events that will continue to happen and get worse in the near future. We should all enjoy this Christmas.
 

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