The event happened around March 14-16, until today it has only been confirmed by satellite images. And it has surprised scientists, many of whom can’t even believe their eyes. Accordingly, an ice shelf called Conger with an area nearly the same as Da Nang city in Antarctica has collapsed into the Southern Ocean.
It is worth mentioning that this ice shelf is located in the East Antarctic region. This was once thought to be an extremely stable region, with the highest altitudes, driest climate and coldest temperatures.
“We couldn’t have foreseen seeing that ice shelf collapse“, said Peter Neff, a glaciologist at the University of Minnesota, USA.
“Since humans have satellite data from East Antarctica, I don’t think collapse is possible in this whole region.“, adds Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey.
This area was once an ice shelf attached to the Antarctic continent. Now it has broken up into icebergs designated C-37 and C-38.
The Conger ice shelf in Antarctica collapsed around mid-March, when the outdoor temperature was -12 degrees Celsius
The Conger is an ice shelf of 460 square miles, or 1200 square kilometers, located east of Antarctica. This ice shelf is on the mainland of Wilkes Land, above a 300-mile-wide crater of the same name that probably formed about 250 million years ago.
This area of ice appeared in the movie The X-Files, where a giant laboratory was secretly built beneath its surface. There are reasons for the screenwriter to choose Wilkes Land as that key location.
In real life, this is a stable, super-cold region of ice with outdoor temperatures that can drop to -65 degrees Celsius. But since the beginning of the month, Russia’s Concordia research station set up on Wilkes Land has measured the level. record high temperature, up to -12 degrees Celsius. This temperature is said to be up to 40 degrees higher than the same period last year.
Record-high temperatures were a direct factor in the collapse of the Conger ice shelf. But everything could have been quietly happening long before that.
According to Catherine Walker, an glaciologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Conger collapsed between March 14 and 16. That was after Antarctica was affected by a long plume of water vapor known as “” atmospheric river” or “sphere river”. This stream of water vapor moving in the Earth’s atmosphere brought heat from the tropics to the South Pole.
At the same time, a high pressure system called “heat dome” formed and moved to East Antarctica. After that, the thermal dome stayed there, trapping heat and moisture and melting the ice here.
This whole process took about a few months, but the root of the problem has been going on for decades. “This heat wave in Antarctica is just a drop of water.”, Walker said. The global temperature has been continuously increasing for decades as humans continue to industrialize and put more and more CO2 in.2 into the atmosphere.
Satellite images show Conger’s collapse that took place between March 14 and 16.
Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are warming faster than the rest of the planet. Before the collapse of the Conger Ice Shelf, Antarctica’s ice cover had dropped to an all-time low.
“It’s just melting and melting“, said Walker.We are just seeing the inevitable outcome of long-term warming of the Earth and oceans.”
Chain Reaction: Doomsday Prophecy is Fulfilling
The collapse of the Conger ice shelf comes just months after scientists predicted the collapse of another large ice shelf. Called “apocalyptic ice shelf“, Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is also melting beyond “tipping points”.
This is the term for this tipping point, meaning that if the glacier melts above that threshold, it will trigger an unstoppable chain of meltdowns. As a result, the entire West Antarctic ice sheet will fall into the ocean, raising sea levels by 3 meters.
The event is compared to epic “apocalyptic” legends, because at that time, sea water could swallow many coastal cities, from New York, Shanghai, to Ho Chi Minh City.
Thwaites Glacier: The apocalyptic ice shelf is about to collapse
Although the Conger Ice Shelf is east of Antarctica, close to the Thwaites, its collapse in Antarctica’s coldest and highest ice has solidified it even further.doomsday prophecy”. No one could have predicted that Conger would even crash before the ice shelves of the Southwest.
“The whole of Antarctica was once locked in an ice box. And it’s used to being surrounded by ice shelves at the edge of this continent“, said Ted Scambos, glaciologist at the University of Colorado.
But now, temperatures and warm ocean waters are eroding the ice box beyond the edge of the Antarctic continent. Scambos likens it to a piece of wood that is pressed so hard that it eventually crumbles. “What happened to Conger is a prime example of how Antarctica is responding to pressure.”he said.
Scambos further explains that while the Conger is not a very large ice shelf, every time we see such an ice shelf bounce off the continent and become an iceberg floating out in the ocean, the outer ice regions within them all felt a pressure that they too would fall.
In other words, when any ice shelf at the edge of Antarctica bounces off, it causes the ice within it to thin and corrode and then melt rapidly. “It’s very hard to stop, once it starts“, Scambos emphasized.
If we don’t brake, if we don’t slow down this process, our children and grandchildren born today will suffer terrible consequences in their future.
“Although I won’t live to see that moment, other people who are a little younger than me will live to see it come true.”, Scambos said. “And that means our generation owes them an action, to try to solve this problem as soon as possible.”
Refer to CNN, Sciencealert