The World Is Literally Falling Apart

Jugal K. Patel at the New York Times: An Iceberg the Size of Delaware Just Broke Off a Major Antarctic Ice Shelf.

A chunk of floating ice that weighs more than a trillion metric tons broke away from the Antarctic Peninsula, producing one of the largest icebergs ever recorded and providing a glimpse of how the Antarctic ice sheet might ultimately start to fall apart.

A crack more than 120 miles long had developed over several years in a floating ice shelf called Larsen C, and scientists who have been monitoring it confirmed on Wednesday that the huge iceberg had finally broken free.

The event fundamentally changes the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula, according to Project Midas, a research team from Swansea University and Aberystwyth University in Britain that had been monitoring the rift since 2014.

"The remaining shelf will be at its smallest ever known size," said Adrian Luckman, a lead researcher for Project Midas. "This is a big change. Maps will need to be redrawn."

Larsen C, like two smaller ice shelves that collapsed before it, was holding back relatively little land ice, and it is not expected to contribute much to the rise of the sea. But in other parts of Antarctica, similar shelves are holding back enormous amounts of ice, and scientists fear that their future collapse could dump enough ice into the ocean to raise the sea level by many feet. How fast this could happen is unclear.

Back in early June, I mentioned that scientists were raising the alarm that the section of Larsen C was "hanging by a thread." That was the same week Donald Trump withdrew the United States from a global climate change agreement.

That decision did not, of course, cause Larsen C to snap. It does not bode well for the future of the Antarctic, however. Which is inextricably tied to our own collective future.