Antarctic Ice Shelf Breaking Up During Southern Winter. AFP, July 11, 2008. "New evidence has emerged that a large plate of floating ice shelf attached to Antarctica is breaking up, in a troubling sign of global warming, the European Space Agency (ESA)said on Thursday. Images taken by its Envisat remote-sensing satellite show that Wilkins Ice Shelf is 'hanging by its last thread' to Charcot Island, one of the plate's key anchors to the Antarctic peninsula, ESA said in a press release... The Antarctic peninsula -- the tongue of land that juts northward from the white continent towards South America -- has had one of the highest rates of warming anywhere in the world in recent decades. But this latest stage of the breakup occurred during the Southern Hemisphere's winter, when atmospheric temperatures are at their lowest. One idea is that warmer water from the Southern Ocean is reaching the underside of the ice shelf and thinning it rapidly from underneath."
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