The 4,000 year old, 41 square mile long Ayles Ice Shelf, has broken off of an island 500 miles from the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic. The giant floating chunk of ice may threaten shipping and oil/gas operations this Spring.
Mother earth could be attacking the source of global warming as one of her icy battleships breaks up into a frozen, fighting flotilla...
The ice broke free 16 months ago triggering tremors by earthquake monitors 155 miles away. It took more than a year for scientists to figure out what had happened.
The Artic expert Warwick Vincent, of Laval University in Quebec, said he had never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice and suggested the break-up indicated that climate change was accelerating.Dr Vincent, who has travelled to the ice island, said yesterday: "This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead.
"We think this incident is consistent with global climate change. We aren't able to connect all of the dots ... but unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role."
He said Canada's remaining ice shelves were 90% smaller than when they were first discovered 100 years ago.
The huge ice island could pose a hazard to shipping and the oil and gas industry if it drifts further south into the Beaufort sea in the spring thaw.
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1979937,00.html
Ice shelves are floating tongues of glaciers that fill bays in the Arctic and Antarctic. The shelves are attached to land and are much thicker than pack ice—freely floating masses of sea ice.The Ayles ice shelf was believed to be 3,000 to 4,500 years old.
Before the breakup the Canadian Arctic had six ice shelves,
"Now there are five," said Luke Copland, a geographer with the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061229-arctic-ice.html
It's frustrating that most people don't seem to care about Global Warming. I fear it will take a disaster of Biblical proportions to wake people up...and then it will be too late.
Whether it’s a scientific reality (a Bush administration question) or just a natural cycle of epic warming and cooling, it is still a (virtual) reality.
It will become an actual priority with them, however, if large floating ice chunks begin to threaten the oil/gas/shipping industry.
PS: It's great to see you again!