Collapse of the Wilkins ice shelf?

Usually 'scientific' stories like these fail to hit the headlines, unless accompanied by some wild doom and gloom headlines or miracle diet. The BBC however ran this story last week after capturing some video footage of the Wilkins Ice Shelf collapse. Further press reports by The Guardian, The Times and CNN brought the story into the mainstream, placing the blame firmly at the hands of global warming (who or what else?).


source: National Snow and Ice Data Center

Rather than just read-about it, a number of GE Community Members contributed to KML links showing imagery in Google Earth, some of them over time. My favourite KML though is the delightfully simple effort by NASA to compile four images showing the moment of the breakup, and the end result just over two weeks later. Samples below.



Of course, Ogle Earth had the best round-up, with some nice embedded videos and it's own KML file. For an overview of the different ice shelves and excellent links to imagery, you could do worse than the National Snow and Ice Data Center's compilation of it's Antarctic data sets. Plenty of images available there to import into a virtual globe there!