In this NASA Imagery you can see the ice bridge, in fragments.
The Wilkins Ice Shelf, on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, used to have an ice bridge connecting it to nearby Charcot Island, until that ice bridge collapsed in early April, 2009.
Fred Clark over at Slacktivist had this to say about the mounting documentation of the world’s shifting climate:
My point here is not that this ice bridge is thought to have been the stabilizing factor keeping the entire, massive Wilkins ice shelf in place, and that the ice shelf is, in turn, considered to be the stabilizing factor keeping in place an even larger mass of ice in Antarctic glaciers and thus that the collapse of this ice bridge may therefore be a sign that we’re going to be Even More Screwed by climate change and rising sea levels. That’s all true, but that’s not my point here.
My point here is that these are photographs. Visual evidence. One need only look at those photographs to see that something is happening — to see it happening and thus to have to acknowledge that it is, in fact, happening.
But a great many people seem deeply invested in believing — photographs be damned — that nothing is happening. They insist that nothing is getting warmer, that ice is not melting.
In this ESA image dated April 28, 2009, you can see Charcot Island in the upper left and the Wilkins Ice Shelf in the lower right.
The Associated Press reported this story as “Huge ice chunks break away from Antarctic shelf”
“There is little doubt that these changes are the result of atmospheric warming,” said David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey.
Researchers said the quality and frequency of the ESA satellite images have allowed them to analyze the Wilkins shelf breakup far more effectively than any previous event.
“For the first time, I think, we can really begin to see the processes that have brought about the demise of the ice shelf,” Vaughan said.
Annotations by A. Humbert, Münster University
That’s very disturbing.