Antarctica

Published on Saturday 4 April 2009 19:57

A MASSIVE ice shelf anchored to the Antarctic coast by a narrow ice bridge is starting to break away, warns the European Space Agency.

The Paris-based agency said satellite images showed the bridge between Wilkins Ice Shelf and Charcot and Latady Islands "looks set to collapse". It said: "The beginning of what appears to be the demise of the ice bridge began this week" when new rifts appeared and a large block of ice broke away.

The shelf originally covered about 5,000sq miles, the size of Jamaica. Stable in the last century, it began retreating in the 1990s. It lost 14% of its mass last year alone, the agency quotes Angelika Humbert of Munster University as saying, and is now

985 yards across at its narrowest. "The ice bridge is deforming, its narrowest location acting as a kind of hinge," said Humbert.

Scientists are examining whether global warming – the 2.5C average rise in Antarctic temperatures in the last half century – is responsible.