A newly discovered long and craggy rift is splintering across West Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier, satellite images show. The nearly 19-mile-long (30 kilometers) rift started in the middle of the ice shelf, where the ice shelf touches warmer ocean waters that are melting it from underneath, said Stef Lhermitte, an assistant professor in the Department of Geoscience and Remote Sensing at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. The rift only has about another 6 miles (10 km) to go before one or more icebergs calf, breaking off from the glacier.
This video, which runs from 2002 to 2016, depicts just how much ice Pine Island Glacier is losing. (In the video, the colors yellow, orange, red and black represent ice loss, while blue indicates ice gain.)
— source scientificamerican.com | Oct 12, 2018