The Antarctic ice shelf shattered, threatening to drown many cities

Antarctic ice shelves are shattered from within, threatening to spike sea level and submerge many coastal cities.

Cracks in the Pine Island glacier, west of Antarctica taken from a high satellite by the US Aerospace Agency (NASA) on November 4.(Photo: NASA.)

US scientists gather evidence from satellite images that the Antarctic ice shelf is disintegrating from within under the impact of global warming , according to Science Alert. This crack formed in the center of the ice shelf in the past few months, heralding a worrying trend. The study was published on November 28 in Geophysical Research.

The research team at Ohio University, USA, is trying to predict how this ice shelf will be broken to the future global sea level . This is important because half of the world's population lives in coastal areas.

"We no longer wonder whether the Antarctic ice sheets melt. The problem is that they will melt when they are ," said Ian Howat, a researcher at Ohio University. "How cracked ice sheets show that the glacial melting mechanism is happening quickly and it is likely that we are about to see the Antarctic ice shelf collapse."

According to the researchers, the warm water of the ocean seeps into the cracks between the ice sheets , causing them to heat up from below. Over time, this warm water will melt more and more ice around it until it forms a large crack.

" The cracks often formed at the edge of the ice, where the ice is thin and easy to crack. However, the Pine Island glacier event broke a large array of last year due to cracking from inside and spreading out. Howat tape, " explains Howat. "This means that the central part of the iceberg is weakened by some reason, most likely a large crevice appearing below the warming of the ocean."

If the entire Antarctic ice sheet melted into the ocean, the sea level would suddenly spike three meters globally, endangering many coastal cities like London, England or New York, USA.

"We need to understand exactly the formation of cracks on ice sheets, understand their role in stabilizing the ice shelf. Tracking internal disintegration is limited when viewed from space. , so we need to go directly to collect data and observe in more detail, " said Howat.