Antarctica’s Wilkins Ice Shelf is a 5000 square mile sheet of permanent floating ice off of Antarctica’s southwest peninsula which has been in place for at least a few hundred years. Satellite images are now showing that a large hunk of the shelf is disintegrating as a result of global climate change, which effects temperature on the continent more dramatically than anywhere else on the planet.

“Block after block of ice is just tumbling and crumbling into the ocean,” Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, said.

“The shelf is not just cracking off and a piece goes drifting away, but totally shattering. These kinds of events, we don’t see them very often. But we want to understand them better because these are the things that lead to a complete loss of the ice shelf.”

Mr Scambos said a large part of the ice shelf was now supported by only a thin strip of ice. This last “ice buttress” could collapse and about half the total ice shelf area could be lost in the next few years, he added.

British Antarctic Survey scientist David Vaughan said: “This shelf is hanging by a thread.”

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