Melting in Antarctica continues to accelerate: one of the largest icebergs that broke away from the Pine Island Glacier swam into the Amundsen Sea.
Pine Island Glacier descending into the Amundsen Sea is the most "problematic" in Antarctica. It accounts for about a quarter of the ice that the continent has been losing recently, about 45 billion tons annually. A particularly impressive event happened here recently: satellite images obtained on September 23-24, 2017 showed a deep break of an iceberg breakaway from the glacier with an area of 267 square meters. km.
Observations of the Sentinel 1 satellite were confirmed by images of MODIS and Landsat 8. This loss was not as grandiose as the iceberg that recently broke away from the Larsen C glacier (about 5800 sq. Km). However, for Pine Island, this is the third largest event in recent years after icebergs recorded in 2013 (652 sq km) and 2015 (582 sq km). Experts explain that in this case, it is not so much the size of the new iceberg that is important, but the tendency towards accelerating melting.
For a glacier in the far southern regions of Antarctica, Pine Island is shrinking at an alarming rate when it was perfectly stable a century ago. Meanwhile, scientists are observing new cracks that are already forming in the depths of the glacier and stretching to its edges - possibly the result of the impact of the ocean water, eroding it from below. This is accompanied by the acceleration of the ice of Pine Island, which is sliding further into the sea today four times faster than just 30 years ago - at a speed of up to 4 km per year.
If events unfold unchanged, then by the end of the century the Pine Island Glacier will disappear completely. This will expose the continental ice of the western Antarctic ice sheet and accelerate the melting of its vast reserves.
Sergey Vasiliev