Wilkins Ice Shelf

The Wilkins ice shelf is about the size of Connecticut and breaking up. The ice is "hanging by a thread" from the Antarctic Peninsula because of global warming, the British Antarctic Survey said Tuesday.

Scientists say the size of the threatened shelf is about 5,571 square miles.

"We are in for a lot more events like this," said professor Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Scambos alerted the British Antarctic Survey after he noticed part of the Wilkins ice shelf disintegrating on February 28, when he was looking at NASA satellite images.

Late February marks the end of summer at the South Pole and is the time when such events are most likely, he said.

"The amazing thing was, we saw it within hours of it beginning, in between the morning and the afternoon pictures of that day," Scambos said of the large chunk that broke away on February 28.

The Wilkins ice shelf lost about 6 percent of its surface a decade ago, the British Antarctic Survey said in a statement on its Web site. (...more)

A53A Iceberg Splits Off

Envisat captures the break up of the massive A53A iceberg located just east of the South Georgia Island (visible at image bottom) in the southern Atlantic Ocean.

A huge fissure was spotted running south to north through the berg on 1 March by C-CORE, the Canadian ice-tracking service, while studying satellite images collected from Envisat’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) instrument using the Polar View monitoring programme.

The radar image indicated the berg was unstable and likely to split. Just days afterwards on 4 March, Envisat's Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) sensor captured the break. Both bergs are estimated to measure around 30 km in length. As a reference, South Georgia Island is approximately 180-km long.

The break up of A53A, which calved off the Larsen Ice Shelf in late April 2005, occurred in relatively warm waters, making it highly likely that numerous smaller icebergs and ice islands will calve off the two icebergs. (...continue)

Kite-powered ship sets sail for greener future

A cargo ship pulled by a giant, parachute-shaped kite will leave Germany on Tuesday on a voyage that could herald a new "green" age of commercial sailing on the high seas.

The owners of the MS Beluga, a 462ft cargo vessel, will try to prove that modern steel ships can harness wind power and reduce their reliance on diesel engines.

During the journey from Bremen to Venezuela, the crew will deploy a SkySail, a 160 square metre kite which will fly more than 600ft above the vessel, where winds are stronger and more consistent than at sea level.

Its inventor, Stephan Wrage, a 34-year-old German engineer, claims the kite will significantly reduce carbon emissions, cutting diesel consumption by up to 20 per cent and saving £800 a day in fuel costs. He believes an even bigger kite, up to 5,000 square metres, could result in fuel savings of up to 35 per cent. (...continue)

Newfoundland Frozen Waves

This strange weather phenomenon happened in Newfoundland where the waves were actually frozen as they crashed on the beach. This strange weather phenomenon happened in Newfoundland where the waves were actually frozen as they crashed on the beach. Wouldn't want to go surfing that day.

Arctic Ice All Gone By 2012?

An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.

Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press.

This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."

• Ominous Arctic Melt Worries Experts >

Beijing's Environmental Challenge

With the 2008 Olympics coming up in Beijing, there's a lot of talk about air quality and traffic in the capital of China. One thousand new cars go on the road in Beijing every day, joining the three to four million cars that are already jamming the streets and threatening public health. Breath the air in Beijing and you're breathing the world's highest levels of lung-damaging nitrous oxide, according to a recent study. As well las a lot of particulates.

So China is facing a big challenge: how to move people without choking them.

• Beijing's Environmental Challenge >

What is C19A?

C19A is now the largest iceberg in the world.

Icebergs like C19A are named I believe in part to their coordinates on a map.

With an approximate size of 2,264 square miles in size, C19A became the largest iceberg in the world after the previous largest iceberg, B15 broke into two different pieces. The B15 weighed in at around 4,400 square miles in size. As the B15 iceberg continues to break up, the C19A takes the title of largest 'berg until it starts to cracks.

A giant crack across the B15 iceberg broke it off into two pieces in the last month.

• Antarctic Meteorological Research Center>
• National Ice Center (NIC) >