Ayles Ice Shelf In Arctic Broke Up 16 Months Ago, Scientists Discover - Impact Noted On Seismographs

An ancient ice shelf has cracked off northern Ellesmere Island, creating an enormous 66-square-kilometre ice island and leaving a trail of icy blocks in its wake. "It really is incredible," said Warwick Vincent of Universite Laval, one of the few people to have laid eyes on the scene. "It's like a cruise missile has come down and hit the ice shelf."

The breakup was so powerful, earthquake monitors 250 kilometres away picked up the tremors as the 3,000- to 4,500-year-old shelf tore away from its fjord on Ellesmere. It broke up 16 months ago, but no one was present to see it. The scientists say they are only now making public details after piecing together what occurred using seismic monitors and Canadian and U.S. satellites. They say the ice shelf collapse, suspected to have been caused by global warming, is the biggest in Canada in 30 years and is indicative of the transformation under way on Ellesmere, Canada's most northern land mass.

"We are seeing incredible changes," said Vincent, whose group is studying the island's disappearing ice shelves and their unique ecosystems. "People talk of endangered animals - well, these are endangered landscape features and we're losing them." The Ayles ice shelf was one of six ice shelves left in Canada, remnants of a vast icy fringe that used to cover the top end of Ellesmere. Scientists consider the Canadian shelves, located about 800 kilometres south of the North Pole, sentinels that reflect the accelerating change in the Arctic. In 2002, one of Vincent's graduate students, Derek Mueller, discovered that Ellesmere's Ward Hunt ice shelf had cracked in half. The researchers have also seen the sudden collapse of ice dams and the draining of 30-kilometre-long lakes into the sea.

The shelves are 90 per cent smaller than they were when Arctic explorer Robert Peary crossed them in 1906. And the Ayles ice shelf can be erased from Canada's maps. "It no longer exists," Vincent said.

EDIT

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=e4c99314-a71a-4418-a246-eea457e8b873&k=82636

the adding of large amounts of fresh water to the oceans might play the devil with important currents. The future is now! Stop Catastrophic Climate Change! Give the Earth's life a chance! Stop spewing CO2 into the atmosphere! Please............

it's a pretty big development.

:hi:

I don't think we have 20.

And it's not 20 years to stop increasing... it's 20 years (or less) to become carbon NEGATIVE.

Or figure out something else (those outlandish solar shade ideas come to mind).

If we don't, the changes hit (have already hit?) a titration point and we enter a period of positive feedback with no help from us... the climate changes (dramatically) until we reach the next meta stable environment (whatever that might be) and then it will wait (centuries... maybe longer) to see a set of changes profound enough to shift it back to some other stable climate (maybe another warming period). Point is, man has developed on earth in this inter-glaciation period, we will not survive a major climate change... at least 99.999 percent of us won't. We fool with the climate at our own peril.

There are some really major ice shelves in the Antarctic that are breaking up as well. Not to mention the ice on Greenland (that's the stuff that will raise the level of the oceans).

climate change is happening faster and faster

scary

to forgive my generation and my parents' generation for our wasteful ways.

My BIL is really stepping up to the plate. He is now buying mostly organic, and shooting for the 100-mile diet in WI. Made me ashamed that I am not doing as much here in CA.

An ancient ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields that broke off Ellesmere Island could be dangerous when it starts to drift in the spring, a scientist says.

The collapse of the ice island's northern coast represents the largest breakup of its kind in the Canadian Arctic in 30 years, the head of a new global ice lab at the University of Ottawa said on Thursday.

Luke Copland, an assistant professor at the school's department of geography, said scientists are surprised at the speed of the collapse of the Ayles ice shelf, about 800 kilometres south of the North Pole. It took less than an hour.

He said the new island formed by the 66-square-kilometre fragment, which could be up to 4,500 years old, could present a serious risk to oil platforms in its drift path in the spring.

At the longest and widest spans, the remains of the Ayles shelf are about 15 kilometres long and five kilometres wide. The fragment is between 30 and 40 metres thick.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2006/12/28/tech-ellesmereiceshelfcollapse-20061228.html

tow this sucker out of the arctic ocean, though the bering strait, past the Aleutian Islands and down the coast to offshore California. At which time it's a race to cut up the shrinking iceberg (which is only 40 meters thick) and bring the pieces onshore to fill reservoirs and/or sell as bottled water.

the ice is 3000 years old and fresh water. My calculations show that there is 2 to 3 million acre feet of this water, possibly less by the time you get it somewhere. That 5279 BILLION half-liter bottles of "Ice Shelf Water"(tm)! I don't know if ocean going tugs could tow it, it's going to have a large mass...

Possibly an ecological disaster for marine life wherever you park it, though it's really NOT that big (just sounds big).

OTOH, it's a problem where it is and it's going to melt over the next few years anyway (what I think a lot of people don't understand about Global Warming is that even if we went carbon neutral tomorrow, the whole planet, there are still these effects that just can't be reversed in the next 1000 years or so).

Oh well, random thoughts.