The 2004, Dennis Quaid movie Day after Tomorrow starts with an opening sequence where a whole Antarctic Ice Shelf breaks into two. It is an scene which inspires awe (as much as the movie does). The problem is that within 4 years of a fictional rendition, we are beginning to see the real time breaking of the ice shelfs. An area of an Antarctic ice shelf almost the size of New York City has broken into icebergs this month after the collapse of an ice bridge. This is blamed on the glabal warming phenomenon.The northern ice front of the Wilkins Ice Shelf has become unstable and the first icebergs have been released.700 sq km (270.3 sq mile) of ice -- bigger than Singapore or Bahrain and almost the size of New York City -- has broken off the Wilkins this month and shattered into a mass of icebergs. Wilkins could lose a total of 800 to 3,000 sq kms of area after the ice bridge shattered. The Wilkins shelf has already shrunk by about a third from its original 16,000 sq kms when first spotted decades ago, its ice so thick would take at least hundreds of years to form.
Nine other shelves -- ice floating on the sea and linked to the coast -- have receded or collapsed around the Antarctic peninsula in the past 50 years, often abruptly like the Larsen A in 1995 or the Larsen B in 2002. The trend is widely blamed on climate change caused by heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels.Temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula have warmed by up to 3 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) this century, Vaughan said, a trend climate scientists blame on global warming from burning fossil fuels in cars, factories and power plants.
While Ice sheets donot add to the level of sea water because the are mostly submerged and would release an equal volume as much they are submerged in, there is a grave risk that the retreat of ice sheets would accelerate Global warming which in return would melt the land based ice glaciers, not only increasing the sea water level but also making the availability of fresh water resources on earth scarce.
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