Scambos said his team and colleagues at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge had predicted the breakup would happen and had their suspicions confirmed by satellite radar images. The sudden appearance of thousands of small icebergs suggests that the shelves are essentially broken up in place and then flushed out by storms or currents afterward. Scientists expected the two shelves to fail soon, but the current disintegration is occurring at an even faster rate than earlier breakups gave reason to anticipate. To have retreats totaling 3,000 square kilometers in a single year is clearly an escalation. Within a few years, much of the Wilkins ice shelf will likely be gone.
Ice shelves are long-term floating plates of ice attached to continents.
They form when large glaciers flow toward the ocean in polar areas. The threat of rising sea levels is the main concern with Antarctic warming. If thicker ice shelves on the colder main part of the continent were to collapse, they would release vast quantities of water. Somes say the peninsular warming would have to spread to the rest of the continent and persist for 200 years before these critical ice shelves would become endangered, others say sea levels could rise earlier. Antarctica, the fifth largest continent, contains about 90 percent of the world's glacial ice.