The largest single unbroken ice sheet in the Arctic has just got smaller

The largest single un-broken piece of ice in the Arctic existed in Greenland, but it has just got significantly smaller. The piece that broke off is not exactly small, measuring around 110 square miles in size. This huge peace is already started to break into far more smaller pieces.

The Greenland ice sheet moves slowly down towards the sea as a result of the pull of gravity, essentially as one vast glacier. At the sea expected to 2 flows, and one of these the Spalte Glacier is the mass of ice that has broken up. This iceflo is part of something called the north-eastern Greenland ice stream, and curry is roughly 15% of the the ice from Greenland into the sea.

The concern as with any of these break offs, is that there is now nothing holding the weight of the ice further up hill. As a result one often follows this is a significant increase in the rate of flow of these glaciers. the hope however is that this full ice sheets will not disintegrate fully for another couple of decades. As I wrote recently, the ice coming off Greenland just in 2019 was enough to raise ocean depths buy 1.5 mm around the entire world.

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