A huge ice shelf is close to breaking away from part of the Antarctic Peninsula, according to reports by the European Space Agency on Friday.

 

Satellite images taken on April 2 by ESA confirm that the rifts are quickly expanding along the ice bridge that connects the Wilkins Ice Shelf to Charcot and Latady Islands, the Paris-based agency said in a press release.

 

The Wilkins Ice Shelf was stable for most of the last century, covering around 16,000 square kilometers before it began to retreat in the 1990s.

“It had been there almost unchanged since the first expeditions which mapped it back in the 1930s, so it had a very long period of real stability, and it's only in the last decade that it's started to retreat,” said Professor David Vaughan, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey.

 

Over the past year, the ice shelf has lost about 1,800 square kilometers or about 14 percent of its size during several breakup events, said Angelika Humbert of the Institute of Geophysics at Germany's Muenster University.

 

The Wilkins Ice Shelf is the size of the state Connecticut and it’s the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula yet to be threatened. However, the ice shelf will not cause a rise in sea level, if it breaks away, according to scientists, because it is already floating.