One of the Arctic’s six major ice shelves has broken off from its island home, Canadian scientists have discovered.
In what is being suggested as another indicator of global warming, the 42 square mile Ayles ice shelf broke away Ellesmere Island in 2005, but the event has only recently been discovered. Ice shelves are large stable masses of ice floating on the sea but attached to land for thousands of years.
The Ayles ice shelf, now an ice floe, has since refrozen into a wider mass of sea ice but it appears it has left Ellesmere for good and could cause hazards for shipping come the Northern Spring thaw.
While average temperatures across the globe have risen distinctly in the recent decades, the rate of warming in the Arctic has been greater than any other major region of the globe.
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