Antarctica's Ice Shelf 'Ripping Apart', Prompting Collapse of 180 Trillion Tons of Glacier in 20 years

A study has warned that Antarctica's 180 trillion ton Pine Island glacier could collapse within 20 years as the floating ice shelf assisting in holding it back is 'ripping apart.'

Pine Island Ice Shelf

The Pine Island ice shelf - sited on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet - has been noticed to have been thinning now for decades due to climate change. However, analysis of satellite images undertaken by scientists led from the University of Washington has revealed a more dramatic loss in recent years.

From 2017 to 2020, large icebergs at the border of the ice shelf have snapped off into the Amundsen Sea, bringing about an acceleration of the glacier further inland. The Pine Island Glacier is already accountable for a quarter of Antarctica's ice loss - and its entire loss could see sea levels rise by approximately 0.5 metres (1.6 feet).

Lead author Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the UW Applied Physics Laboratory said: "We may not have the opulence of waiting for slow changes on Pine Island; things could really go much rapidly than expected, the processes we'd been studying in this area were causing an irreversible collapse, but at a fairly measured pace."

Joughin added that things could be much more sudden and unexpected if the rest of that ice shelf is lost.

Also Read: LOOK: Scientists Discovers the Deepest Land Canyon on Earth Under the Antarctic Ice Sheet

Thinning of the Pine Island Ice Shelf

Generally speaking, the thinning of the Pine Island ice shelf over the last few decades has been due to the presence of warmer ocean currents which have been melting the underpart of the floating ice mass.

This lead to an increase of the glacier behind the ice shelf between the 1990s and 2019, which went from propelling at a rate of 2.5 km (1.5 miles) every year to 4 km (2.5 miles) on a yearly basis - after which, however, its speed becomes stable for a decade.

The recent changes, however, are being brought about by a different process, Dr Joughin explained - one that is linked to the internal forces acting within the glacier.

He added that the ice shelf seems to be ripping itself apart because of the glacier's acceleration in the past decade or two.

The Ice Flow Model

Between 2017 and 2020, the Pine Island ice shelf lost about a fifth of its region in series of dramatic breaks which the European Space Agency's Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites captured.

In their study, Dr Joughin and his team analysed pictures of the ice shelf taken between January 2015 and March 2020 - discovering that the movement of two points on the surface of the glacier had accelerated by 12 per cent between 2017-2020.

An ice flow model - made at the University of Washington - verified that the loss of the ice shelf was responsive for the observed acceleration.

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