Giant Greenland Glacier Collapses
Creates iceberg four times size of Manhattan
A giant sheet of ice has broken off Greenland’s Petermann Glacier. Measuring 100 square miles (about four times the size of Manhattan), it’s the largest Arctic iceberg to calve since 1962.
If the waters around the new iceberg don’t freeze over this winter, the new iceberg will continue to drift south and become a shipping hazard.
Scientists cannot say definitively that the collapse of the glacier is due to climate change, but Patrick Lockerby, a UK engineer with a background in material science, said he had been observing the glacier and that this was to be expected.
“I was watching the floating ice tongue wedged between two walls of a fjord for three quarters if its length with the last part at the outlet end wedged by sea ice,” he told the BBC. “I thought once the sea ice was gone, the pressure would be too great and the tongue would calve.”