The Antarctic is divided into giant icebergs

More than three decades ago, the University of California and NASA's reaction lab announced that the Antarctic had begun to melt.

"A flying bird, the ice floe of Pine Island, Antarctica, is a train that is slowly moving towards ruin.Of course from the human point of view.In geological time, everything happens in one wink of the eye.

So begins the article "The Antarctic is divided into giant icebergs: the beginning of the end" of National Geographic in which they claim that it "exists more than three decades ago." University of California and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory – JPL for its acronyms in English – from NASA, warned that the West Antarctic began to melt.

& # 39; Now, the gigantic block that is about to separate from the pack ice, called Larsen C, may be the precursor to a collapse of the entire continent that, if it occurred, would flood a lot of coastal cities the world, "they say.

According to NatGeo, the banks of the Larsen C break up as easily as a sand castle. Adempas, on its surface, are spread over large cracks that share the space with molten lagoons up to 400 square meters.

The crack that is about to separate the Larsen C from the mainland is nearly 200 kilometers long and in some of its areas, its width can reach 2,000 meters. But when it reaches its full extension, it would result in the creation of an iceberg of about 5,000 square kilometers, one of the largest ever recorded.

This block would have an area of ​​about 25 times that of the city of Buenos Aires, which has 203 square kilometers.

Eric Rignot, a professor at the University of California and scientist at NASA, says the recent reversal of the crack reveals his early split.

In the sea of ​​Amudsen, west of Antarctica, it has warmed by more than 0.5 ° C and the rate at which ice melts and breaks has quadrupled . Predictions of temperature increase in the case of the Wedell Sea, adjacent to the Grand C, are at 5 ° C on average.

The importance of the crack that is developing is that the ice that will clear is located in a series of islands. On the contrary, much of the rest of the peninsula's platform rests on a basin whose depth reaches 5000 km, which makes it particularly vulnerable to the rise in the temperature of the ocean, according to La Nación.

Without the Larsen C and because of the sea temperature, the situation is complicated because the pack ice will disarm and break into pieces smaller and smaller. As the phenomenon occurs at an increasing rate, the sea level will rise by more than three meters, flooding entire cities around the world.

In this way, the melting and breaking of the pack ice in this area of ​​Antarctica is a dramatic case. Between 1994 and 2015, the amount of ice was reduced by 10%. Most disturbing is that the removal of Larsen C ice could affect the nearby Thwaites Glacier, which could destabilize most of West Antarctica.

"It's only a matter of time. The important thing is whether this will happen in a period of 500 years or less than 100 years. And most importantly, if humanity will be fast enough to prepare for events. We need to clarify the incognito and do it before it's too late, "Rignot said.