alienation news

Largest Arctic ice shelf breaks up

The largest ice shelf in the Arctic, a solid feature for 3,000 years, has broken up, scientists in the United States and Canada said on Monday.
They said the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, on the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's Nunavut territory, broke into two main parts, themselves cut through with fissures. A freshwater lake drained into the sea, the researchers reported.
Local warming of the climate is to blame, they said -- adding that they did not have the evidence needed to link the melting ice to the steady, planet-wide climate change known as global warming.
Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the researcher team said the fresh water lake poured out of the 20 mile long Disraeli Fjord.
A similar trend in the Antarctic has caused the break-up of huge ice shelves there.