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Antarctica’s Conger ice shelf thins and eventually crumbles after heatwave

An image of the Antarctic ice shelf taken by NASA’s Modis satellite on March 21, 2022. (Photo: Reuters)

Satellite images show, ice shelf The 1,200 km² wide Conger disintegrated and completely collapsed around March 15.

NASA Earth and Planetary Scientist Catherine Colello Walker shared an image of a white band crumbling to pieces over the ocean.

The ice shelves, the iceberg permanently attached to the land take thousands of years to form and act as dikes to prevent snow and ice from flowing into the ocean, causing sea levels to rise.

Peter Neff, an glaciologist at the University of Minnesota, said the March heat wave, with temperatures rising to 70 degrees Fahrenheit (40°C) above normal in parts of East Antarctica, was tied associated with the phenomenon of “atmospheric rivers”.

This process creates columns hundreds of miles long that carry water vapor from the tropics, creating an effect that Neff describes as “a steam shower.”

The Conger ice shelf in Antarctica thins and eventually crumbles after a heat wave - Photo 1.

Before and after satellite images of the area around the Conger Ice Shelf, which scientists say collapsed in mid-March. (Image: CNN)

“The (Antarctic) climate is highly variable,” said Neff. “This is an extreme warming of at least twice what we would expect.”

Temperatures in the area are usually around -60 degrees F (-51°C) at this time of year, but rose to about -12°C in early March this year.

Surrounded by vast oceans and buffered by winds that tend to protect the ice shelf from warm air penetration, this frozen continent is responding more slowly to climate change than the Arctic. , which is warming at three times the rate of the rest of the world.

Over the last century, East Antarctica has barely warmed, but some areas have been affected, and the continent lost an average of 149 billion tons of ice per year between 2002 and 2020, according to NASA. The loss of the Conger Ice Shelf is the latest example of the changes taking place.

Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said the Conger ice shelf was fractured long before the heatwave hit, and its collapse shows that the Antarctic region reacted to changes in the atmosphere.

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