A 5,800 square km iceberg with twice the volume of Lake Erie, weighing a trillon metric tons (that is 1,000,000,000,000 metric tons), has broken lose from the Antarctic Larsen C shelf.
How large is that? About 10 times the size of Isle of Man, or about the size of Delaware, or about the size of Palestine.
Read the whole story at
http://www.projectmidas.org/blog/calving/
http://www.projectmidas.org/blog/calving/
Nina Tryggvason pure measurements are by nature abstract. Hence the comparisons to give it substance.
Nina Tryggvason – as the article explains, the ice sheet was already floating in the ocean before the breakoff – hence the change in sea level is next to none. The question is if the land held ice will travel faster into the sea or not, after this barrier has disappeared.
Nina Tryggvason I trust Archimedes and the scientists when they say it doesn’t matter.
To get a feel for how big these things are, and how terrifying they are, and how important they are — far beyond the ability of even much bigger scale factors to give a sense of realism — people should look at this video, starting at 3:44, where a scale comparison is drawn between Manhattan island and a calved glacier section in Greenland. youtube.com – “CHASING ICE” captures largest glacier calving ever filmed – OFFICIAL VIDEO
It’s the first thing I ever saw that truly made me believe that human beings were breaking the world.
so what?
Lee Estep The so what is still to be confirmed. If the ice barriere that now has moved away, was holding back the land glaciers, and those glaciers now start sliding into the ocean at higher rate, we will see a rise in sea level. The rise may be larger than only the mass/volume of the ice, since the weight of the ice has pushed down the land. This makes it likely that the land will also rise, and with that add further rise in sea levels. The rise in sea level is the real problem, as it will displace a large percentage of the world’s population as coastal areas are flooded. The hypothesis is that we will see the land born ice slide into the sea, both in Antarctica, and on Greenland. The unknown is how fast or slow it will happen.
https://www.nasa.gov/goddard/risingseas