See the glacier breaking away at the top of the photo slightly to the right of the center.

Posted by Adam

The recent news of the iceberg — or “ice island” as they’re calling it since it’s so enormous — breaking off from Greenland is just the latest sign that climate change is indeed here and affecting us.  While events like this are becoming almost routine, and barely inspire a yawn from the media, we should take a moment to recognize that this is a sign of the end of a certain period in human culture and activity.   While this is the largest iceberg break since 1962, I will happily accept a bet that we’ll see a larger break before the decade is out.  There is something incredibly sad about make this sort of wager, but then again, there’s something incredibly sad about watching the earth as we know it disappear.

From Environment360

“An ice island four times the size of Manhattan has broken off from the Petermann Glacier in Greenland, the largest calving of an iceberg in the Arctic since 1962. The iceberg covers at least 100 square miles and is roughly 700 feet thick — about half the height of the Empire State Building. University of Delaware ocean scientist Andreas Muenchow said that so much freshwater is stored in the massive iceberg that it could keep all U.S. public tap water flowing for four months and could sustain the flow of the Hudson and Delaware rivers for two years. Muenchow said it is unclear whether this massive calving event is related to rising air temperatures in Greenland and the Arctic, but another researcher said that the calving was probably hastened by rising sea and air temperatures in northern Greenland. The Petermann Glacier is one of the two largest remaining glaciers in Greenland that terminate in floating ice shelves. In 1962, a 230-square-miles iceberg broke off from the nearby Ward Hunt Ice Shelf.”