Science: Ice shelf research shows historical collapses

Antarctic drilling project finds the Ross Ice Shelf has collapsed numerous times in the past

A team forming part of the international Antarctica Geological Drilling project (Andrill), led by Dr Tim Naish, a palaeoclimatologist at New Zealand's Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences and one of the chief scientists for the Andrill project, has found that by drilling into the seafloor off Antarctica, that the world's largest ice shelf has disintegrated and reappeared many times in the past.

The aim, said Dr Naish, is to consider what might happen as a result of global warming at levels predicted by the IPCC.

On the Antarctic Peninsula, where temperatures have risen 2.5C in the past 50 years, there have been spectacular ice shelf collapses, including the Larsen B shelf in 2002.

The collapse of an ice shelf can lead to further loss of ice from the Antarctic continent itself. Dr Naish explained: "One of the things we've learnt from the collapse of the ice shelves around the Antarctic Peninsula is that once the ice shelf goes, the glaciers feeding it speed up and you start to lose ice mass off the continent much faster because the ice shelves essentially buttress the glaciers that are feeding them." … "If they collapsed in the past without the present level of CO2 and the Earth was two to three degrees warmer, what's going to happen with the doubling of CO2 and potentially much higher temperatures?"

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