It’s Getting Hot In Here

The Canadian Press reports:

A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada’s Arctic, leaving a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake. The mass of ice broke clear from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometres south of the North Pole.

Have you ever watched a glacier “calf” icebergs into the sea? About two years ago I stood on a vast glacier coming right off a ring of unnamed peaks in Patagonia. As my group trekked across it we could hear periodic snaps that echoed like gunshots across the expanse. This was ice breaking off the mountain cliffs and creaking in the icefall below us where the glacier emptied into a valley. And this was an ordinary sunny day, and these were just the everyday sounds of a slow-moving (and melting) river of ice.

The Canadian ice shelf was already sea ice - its collapse isn’t going to raise sea levels, although it might disrupt shipping lanes. This is unlike the ice fields that really matter, in Greenland and Antarctica - the ones that would dramatically raise sea level if they ever catastrophically collapsed like this. They might never. They might go slowly. But I can hear that glacial creaking in Chile, punctuated by an occasional crash as the ice reaches a snapping point. If you’ve ever been on a glacier, your ears will remind you that you’re not on solid ground - you’re on ice waiting on a little sun and a little melt to crash downhill towards the sea.

PS - You’ll be doubly concerned about keeping those shipping lanes clear from pesky global warming-induced icebergs when you read this: “There’s significant oil and gas development in this region as well, so we’ll have to keep monitoring [the ice shelf's] location over the next few years.”