It is detached from the ice of the Antarctic Peninsula Southwest . It is twice the size of the island
WASHINGTON - It 's a piece of ice of enormous size: an iceberg 41 km long and 2.5 km wide broke off the Wilkins Ice Shelf in the ice, a' area that scientists had predicted would collapse of not less than fifteen years. The cause of the incredible collapse, experts say, is climate change. Broke the news of the Centre national data on snow and ice (NSIDC) University of Colorado who has also released photos taken from a satellite.
SEVEN GREAT VES MANHATTAN - The iceberg is twice the size of the island and started to break away from the pack on 28 February. "This is a sign of worsening global warming," said scientist David Vaughan (British Antarctic Service). The giant fragment that broke off is about 4% of the total of Wilkins Ice Shelf, which measures an area of \u200b\u200bnearly 13,000 square kilometers (as the entire Trentino-Alto Adige). Only a thin layer of ice remained intact to prevent further cracking. Wilkins is about 1600 km away from the tip of South America on the southwest Antarctic Peninsula.
RECORD INCREASE IN TEMPERATURE - Over the past 50 years there has been an increase in this temperature record with more than half a degree Celsius every ten years. "The Wilkins Ice Shelf was there for at least a couple of hundred years, but hot air and the effect of the predicament caused the gap," said Ted Scambos of NSIDC. Since the summer Southern Hemisphere is at the end the researchers did not expect other developments: "This season the show is over," Scambos said. In recent years, broke off two big parts not far from the platform Larsen. In 1995 it had fallen to Larsen A, a block of ice 75 kilometers long and 37 km wide, in March 2002, a NASA satellite observed the collapse of the Larsen B platform in the east of the Antarctic Peninsula, a mass of 720 billion tons of ice disintegrated in less than a month.
Source: www.corriere.it
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