The Big Meltdown

“The glaciers took off like a race horse after the ice shelves were removed,” says Ted Scambos, a researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. “Just a decade ago we glaciologists were talking about gradual changes in glaciers taking place over centuries. Now we’re seeing things that we didn’t think glaciers could do in terms of their speed of response.”
When Antarctica’s Larsen-B ice shelf—a 10,000-year-old, 650-foot thick expanse of floating ice the size of Rhode Island—collapsed three years ago, Pedro Skvarca had a front-row seat. With the Antarctic Peninsula being swept by an unprecedented summer heat wave in February 2002, Skvarca, a glaciologist with the Argentine Antarctic Institute, jumped in a rugged twin-engine turboprop and flew off from his Antarctic research station to inspect the cliff-like seaward edge of the remote ice shelf.

What he saw, Skvarca recalls, was astonishing. “The surface of the ice shelf was almost totally covered by melt ponds and lakes, and waterfalls were spilling over the top and into the ocean,” he says. Great slices of the Larsen-B’s leading edge had broken off, filling the Weddell Sea with icebergs and slush. Two weeks later, almost the entire ice shelf had disintegrated. “It was unbelievable to see how fast it had broken up. The coastline hadn’t changed for more than 9,000 years and then it changed completely in just a few weeks.”

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