Ice Shelf the Size of New York City Collapses in Antarctica

These NASA satellite photographs show the collapse of the Glenzer Conger ice shelf close to Bowman Island

The collapse, captured by satellite images, marked the first time in human history that the frigid region had an ice shelf collapse.

It happened at the beginning of a freakish warm spell last week when temperatures soared more than 70 degrees (40 Celsius) warmer than normal in some spots of East Antarctica.

Satellite photos show the area had been shrinking rapidly the last couple of years, and now scientists wonder if they have been overestimating East Antarctica's stability and resistance to global warming that has been melting ice rapidly on the smaller western side and the vulnerable peninsula.

The ice shelf, about 460 square miles wide (1200 square kilometers) holding in the Conger and Glenzer glaciers from the warmer water, collapsed between March 14 and 16 according to ice scientist Catherine Walker of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

Walker says the region has been stable until two years ago when scientists started noticing the Conger Glenzer shelf reducing in size.

"Basically, for the last, you know, 20 years or so since 2000, it's been losing a little bit here and there, but not much, but then right at the beginning of 2020 or so, it started sort of halving itself every few months. And so it's been going on for maybe two years. And then it just had this little bridge, basically between the continent and Bowman Island, which is one of its pinning points that has been sitting there for, you know, maybe six months to a year holding up, and we couldn't see any big rifts forming in it or anything like that. So we thought it would sort of sit there. But then, you know, over two days, it basically was gone, which was surprising," says Walker.

Another ice scientist Peter Neff from the University of Minnesota says the shelf had existed for thousands of years.

Neff's concern isn't about what he says is a negligible amount of ice lost. He says the issue is about the fact that the collapse happened in east Antarctica which researchers believe is sitting on a solid rock, unlike west Antarctica.

"East Antarctica it's largely not like that, you're sitting on a continent, the old centre of the Antarctic continent, as if you're you're in Michigan or Minnesota here with that really old bedrock and it's sitting on this flat bedrock for the most part. And there are two, I think, roughly two sort of bigger basins that have some deep channels that might have sort of marine ice sheet instability like potential. But that is much less clear than at Thwaites Glacier," says Neff.

Neff said he worries that previous assumptions about East Antarctica's stability may not be correct.

That's important because if the water frozen in East Antarctica melted — and that's a millennia-long process if not longer — it would raise seas across the globe more than 160 feet (50 meters).

It's more than five times the ice in the more vulnerable West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where scientists have concentrated much of their research.

Walker believes more research should now be focussed on the inhospitable east of the icy continent.

She says: "It had been, you know, sort of these slow changes that have happened, relatively slow changes that have happened with the ocean warming and the glacier flow, one fast thing that happened was that weather event last week. And so that, you know, I wouldn't say that it's the entire story, but it certainly added a pressure onto the those ice shelves that we haven't seen before. And so that's why the timing was sort of interesting, I guess."

According to Neff: "This is an ice shelf where there's been no ground based research ever, so we're left to only see from our satellite observations and make our our educated guesses at what's going on from there."

Walker agrees, she believes it's not the melt itself which is of concern but the unprecedented collapse in this area thought to be stable.

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