Antarctica's Scar Inlet Ice Shelf is anticipated to shatter by the end of March

The Scar Inlet Ice Shelf will likely fall apart by the end of Antarctica’s summer, predicted Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. This inlet's ice is the largest remnant of the vast Larsen B shelf that is still attached to the Antarctica peninsula. One small fragment, the Seal Nunataks, clings on as well. In the Southern Hemisphere's summer of 2002, about 1,250 square miles of the enormous Larsen B Ice Shelf splintered into hundreds of icebergs. Scar Inlet is about two-thirds the size of the ice lost from Larsen B and it to is expected to shatter into thousands of pieces. This ice sheet formed over thousands of years as ice sheets and glaciers flow off the land and extend into the ocean to create a thick floating platform of ice. Scar Inlet ice shelf acts as a dam, holding back the glaciers. When this ice shelf disintegrates, it will unleash the glaciers ice and shelf ice at increasing rates into the ocean, which contributes to rising sea level.

The Scar Inlet Ice Shelf is decaying and is quite weak due to a relentless assault of manmade greenhouse gases. The ice is so thin and fractured that it just might collapse on its own, even without melting or a storm. Take a look at the photo above and note that the mélange consists of sea ice, icebergs, fast ice which means it is “fastened”  to the coastline, melt water, and snow in the bay which was once the mighty Larson B ice shelf. This mélange is all that is holding the rifts and fractures of Scar Inlet shelf ice from crumbling into the ocean. 

From the University of Alaska Fairbanks:

University of Alaska Fairbanks glaciologist Erin Pettit said that an ice shelf about 1,000 feet thick and a third the size of Rhode Island is on the verge of shattering into millions of icebergs during February or March, the end of Antarctica’s summer. If it does, the lead researcher and her team will be within viewing distance in a place they hope doesn’t live up to its name — Cape Disappointment.

Pettit, an associate professor in the Department of Geosciences, said studying ice shelves nearing disintegration is necessary because the climate is rapidly changing in Antarctica and Greenland and melting ice caps contribute to changes in sea level. The question is no longer if sea level is going to rise; the questions are how much and how soon.

Scambos writes:

We have come back to this key area of Antarctica because it is on the ‘front line’ of how the continent is responding to warmer air and changing wind patterns. The Larsen B ice shelf, larger than Delaware in the 1990s, disintegrated in a matter of weeks in 2002. Between Jan 31 and March 17 of that year, 3250 km2 of ice 220 meters thick (over 700 feet) crumbled away after a very warm summer with extensive melting. However, one area of the Larsen B remained intact: a sheltered southern bay called Scar Inlet. In the past 14 years, this remnant shelf has changed dramatically, developing many new rifts and fractures. Moreover, since late 2011, the larger bay where the Larsen B once resided has been covered with a solid sheet of frozen ocean ice, called ‘fast ice’ because it is ‘fastened’ (frozen) to the coastline. We suspect that now this fast ice is supporting the weakened Scar Inlet shelf, and that the shelf is poised to break-up (at least partially) if the thin fast ice breaks away. This generally happens in late austral summer. Our mission is to set up a series of instruments for a few weeks to measure the structural state of both the fast ice and the Scar Inlet ice shelf plate.