A 42-square mile chunk of ice has broken off Greenland, adding to evidence that climate change is having devastating effects on the world’s glaciers and ice caps, the Associated Press reports.
The huge iceberg, roughly twice the size of the island of Manhattan, took about 4% of the glacier at the Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden fjord and is expected to eventually make its way into the northern Atlantic Ocean.
The ice shelf in Greenland has permanently lost an of 160 square miles since 1997. While ice shelves tend to lose area over warm summer months, much of it reforms in cold winter months. Warmer air and water temperatures make reformation impossible and cause ice calving deeper in the shelf.
“What is thought-provoking is that if we … had seen this meltdown 30 years ago, we would have called it extreme. So in recent years, we have become accustomed to a high meltdown,” Ruth Mottram, an ice scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute in Copenhagen, said last week.