Breaking of icebergs and the rapid melting of polar ice caps is attributed to global warming of the land and sea.
The Brunt Ice Shelf attached to the western tip of Antarctica was saved from a devastating collision with a 1,270-square kilometre iceberg earlier this month, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced last week. A chunk bigger than the iceberg A-74 would have been knocked off the ice-shelf had the impact been stronger, said ESA.
The breaking of icebergs and the rapid melting of polar ice caps is attributed to global warming of the land and sea. According to Samrat Sengupta, programme director, climate change and renewable energy, Centre for Science and Environment, a Delhi-based non-profit organisation, these events result in an unprecedented rise in sea level and change in ocean currents.
The iceberg broke off Brunt in late February this year. Strong ocean currents prevented it from floating westward into the Wendell Sea, and it hovered close to the shelf’s west coast for six months. Strong easterly winds redirected the giant mass of ice in early August. It began to travel southwards, brushing lightly against the western tip of Brunt, as captured by the agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite.
A nose-shaped portion of West Brunt, which covers an area of 1,700 sq km, is at the brink of being dislodged from the ice shelf due to a deep, growing chasm (Chasm 1), the satellite image showed.
“If the berg had collided more violently with this piece, it could have accelerated the fracture of the remaining ice bridge, causing it to break away,” said ESA’s Mark Drinkwater.
There are already almost 2,000 lawsuits worldwide about climate change, often against fossil-fuel producers, 1,408 in the United States and 450 elsewhere in the world, according to a database by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law
The portion, however, remained grounded on the seabed and attached to Brunt even after the collision, according to an ESA report.
The 130-metre thick ice shelf is the site of the British Antarctic Society’s Halley VI observatory.
Some lawyers liken the history of the rising certainty about climate change to findings last century linking smoking to lung cancer, spurring successful billion-dollar lawsuits against tobacco companies.
There are already almost 2,000 lawsuits worldwide about climate change, often against fossil-fuel producers, 1,408 in the United States and 450 elsewhere in the world, according to a database by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
Strangely, however, despite these incidents and insights, former U.S. President Donald Trump, who favours jobs in the coal industry, sometimes dismissed man-made climate change as a hoax. Before winning office, he wrote on Twitter that global warming was a concept dreamt up by China to hurt U.S. industries.
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