Antarctic iceberg crack develops fork from Aunty

I'm in a boring meeting, fortunately over Skype, so have time to bring you Antarctic iceberg crack develops fork from Aunty. Nicely, they've added Wales for scale; I don't think Swansea is to scale though.

The pretty banding is SAR interferometry which is cute stuff, though I don't think the article mentions that. The other picture in the article is also nice, with a clear break in the ice speed at the crack as you'd expect.

Update: bollox! I forgot the title first time round. That led to an amusing auto-title in Feedly. Fixed now.

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"Nicely, they’ve added Wales for scale;"
It seems to have detached too. Brexit?

By Nick Stokes (not verified) on 02 May 2017 #permalink

As a cryptic crossword clue, the title is a doozy.

The crack seems to be following the line of the M4 from the old Severn crossing, then the A48 to Carmarthen, then cross country to Aberteifi, or possibly Mwnt beach. Curious.

It's much nicer to have boring meetings over WebEx or ATTConnect.

By Eli Rabett (not verified) on 04 May 2017 #permalink

Hautbois -

As those who have been forced to become familiar with the subject know, there is a significant difference between the Welsh north and south of the M4, with those north of the M4/A48 being, how can I put this, 'more insistently welsh'. Clearly this crack is propagating in sympathy with this view of wales.

By Andrew J Dodds (not verified) on 05 May 2017 #permalink

So we can watch Brexit followed by Scotexit followed by NIexit followed by Welshexit?

Pass me the popcorn, please.

By Phil Hays (not verified) on 05 May 2017 #permalink

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/18/climate/antarctica-ice-m…

Mostly graphics, with flowlines showing ice movement; focus is on the areas where warmer ocean water intrudes under the moving ice.

-----excerpt----

This is the first of three dispatches from a New York Times reporting trip to Antarctica.

The acceleration is making some scientists fear that Antarctica's ice sheet may have entered the early stages of an unstoppable disintegration.

Because the collapse of vulnerable parts of the ice sheet could raise the sea level dramatically, the continued existence of the world's great coastal cities — Miami, New York, Shanghai and many more — is tied to Antarctica's fate.

Four New York Times journalists joined a Columbia University team in Antarctica late last year to fly across the world's largest chunk of floating ice in an American military cargo plane loaded with the latest scientific gear.

Inside the cargo hold, an engineer with a shock of white hair directed younger scientists as they threw switches. Gravity meters jumped to life. Radar pulses and laser beams fired toward the ice below....

By Hank Roberts (not verified) on 18 May 2017 #permalink

"A rapid disintegration of Antarctica might, in the worst case, cause the sea to rise so fast that tens of millions of coastal refugees would have to flee inland, potentially straining societies to the breaking point. Climate scientists used to regard that scenario as fit only for Hollywood disaster scripts. But these days, they cannot rule it out with any great confidence."

By Hank Roberts (not verified) on 18 May 2017 #permalink