On September 25, a relevant part of the Amery ice shelf in Antarctica, a huge fragment of ice that will roam the oceans until it melts, washed away by currents and winds . The release of these large blocks of ice, captured by the EU Copernicus program , entails navigation hazards and significant impacts on Antarctica if they increase as they are doing.

In Antarctica, with the exception of the Antarctic Peninsula area, global warming is not as intense as in the Arctic. There is no data available to prove that the shedding of this huge block of ice (called D28) is a consequence of climate change. Although rare , these landslides are considered natural processes: on the Amery platform in particular, it is estimated that they occur every several decades . But there are other platforms, such as that of Larsen, in the eastern part, or those of Alexander Island, in the western part, where detachment is much more frequent and is already attributed to climate change.

But beyond this detachment, the real problem is the disappearance that is occurring from ice shelves , which are huge masses with a great thickness and that are attached to the ice of the Antarctic continent but that are floating in the ocean. These ice masses are frequent in Antarctica and until about 20 years ago they were also in the Arctic, where they remained for thousands of years. However, climate change is making Arctic ice platforms disappear at high speed , demonstrating the devastating effects of climate change.

The loss of these ice caps causes ice on the continent to slide more easily over the oceans . If it is at a higher temperature , as is happening in the Antarctic Peninsula, the ice shelf is not re- formed , but the ice is fragmented and dispersed by the ocean into smaller icebergs , which in turn produces a greater advance of ice from the continent. The consequences of this accelerated ice loss are being studied by major international initiatives, such as the Thwaites glacier. And the first data seems to indicate that these losses could lead to massive disappearances of ice from some areas of the Antarctic continent.

The colossus in figures

  • 315 million The tons of ice that this iceberg contains, one of the largest of all that has come off in Antarctica in the last 50 years.
  • 5,000 km The distance between the great ice floe and the permanent Antarctic base that Spain has built on Livingston Island.
  • 210 meters It is the thickness of this colossal iceberg. Due to its characteristics, the block was known as "loose tooth", due to its similarity, and its separation was predictable. In fact, scientists warned of their fissure for the first time at the beginning of this century, and predicted that it would break between 2010 and 2015. They were wrong in a few years.
  • 1,582 km2. The surface of this frozen mass, the size of Gran Canaria or 15 times the extent of the city of Paris.
  • 65 km It is what measures its diameter, according to the data obtained by the satellites of the European Copernicus program of Earth observation and global environmental monitoring.
  • 2,000,000 km2. It is the extent of sea ice that Antarctica has lost since the end of 2014 to 2017. This amounts to a loss of four times the area of ​​Spain in three years, according to Copernicus estimates.
  • 253 km2. It is what decreased the extent of ice in Antarctica per day until December 2018. Melted ice changes to the warming levels of the Earth.

We need all countries to bet firmly on investing in scientific research studying these and other phenomena in order to understand how climate change accelerates the melting speed of Antarctic ice and how this ice glides over the ocean, putting coastal areas at risk the whole earth

On the right you can see the huge iceberg separated from the Antarctic Platform. It contains 315 million tons of ice. COPÉRNICUS PROJECT

In Spain there are many research projects that observe and study climate change. Projects that are developed in organizations such as the Higher Council of Scientific Research, the Spanish Institute of Oceanography or the National Institute of Agricultural and Food Technology and Research, in many of the Spanish universities or in infrastructure such as the Canary Islands Oceanic Platform or the National Center of Supercomputing in Barcelona. Also in campaigns as ambitious as Antarctica, in which hundreds of Spanish researchers have studied for more than 30 years the changes that occur in the frozen continent aboard oceanographic ships or in our two Antarctic bases, Juan Carlos I and Gabriel de Castilla.

But we must do more. The Intergovernmental Group of Experts on Climate Change ( IPCC ), in its recent report on the effect of climate change on the oceans and the cryosphere (icy area of ​​the Earth), warns of the changes expected in the coming decades if not We act immediately, altering the oceans, the coastal zones and the general climate of the entire planet, since the polar zones are the generators of the climate of the whole earth. It is urgent that we strengthen international institutions and political agreements so that they can retain the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, which causes an exacerbated increase in temperatures on Earth. We are playing the future .

(*) The former Spanish astronaut was this summer, already as minister, at the Spanish Antarctic base Juan Carlos I, in Livingston, 5,000 km from the place where the great ice fracture that has given rise to the iceberg has now occurred D28

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