Massive Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapses The Guardian Tuesday March 19, 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalwarming/story/0,7369,670120,00.html An Antarctic ice shelf just under the size of Cambridgeshire has collapsed in less than a month, British scientists said today. Larsen B, 200 metres thick and with a surface area of 3,250sq km, has collapsed into small icebergs and fragments, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said. Scientists first noted the collapse on satellite images earlier this month before an aircraft was mobilised to obtain aerial images. A BAS research ship navigated her way through the armada of icebergs to obtain photographs and samples. Pooling this data will help determine when such an event last happened and which ice shelves are threatened in future. Dr David Vaughan, a BAS glaciologist, said: "In 1998, BAS predicted the demise of more ice shelves around the Antarctic peninsula. Since then, warming on the peninsula has continued and we watched as piece-by-piece Larsen B has retreated. "We knew what was left would collapse eventually, but the speed of it is staggering. Hard to believe that 500 million billion tonnes of ice sheet has disintegrated in less than a month." Bush Shifts Position on Global Warming Problem acknowledged, but U.S. won't change greenhouse gases policy The Baltimore Sun In a stark shift for the Bush administration, the United States has sent a climate report to the United Nations detailing specific and far-reaching effects that it says global warming will inflict on the American environment. In the report, the administration also for the first time places most of the blame for recent global warming on human actions - mainly the burning of fossil fuels that send heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. But while the report says the United States will be substantially changed in the next few decades - 'very likely' seeing the disruption of snow-fed water supplies, more stifling heat waves and the permanent disappearance of Rocky Mountain meadows and coastal marshes - it does not propose any major shift in the adminstration's policy on greenhouse gases. Instead, it recommends adapting to inevitable changes ... [The new document, "U.S. Climate Action Report 2002," is posted on the Web site of the Environmental Protection Agency.] New York Times News Service, Monday June 3, 2002 Signs of a Thaw in a Desert of Snow Scientists Begin to Heed Inuit Warnings of Climate Change in Arctic The Washington Post Tuesday, May 28, 2002 IQALUIT, Nunavut And so it has come to be, the elders say, a time when icebergs are melting, tides have changed, polar bears have thinned and there is no meaning left in a ring around the moon ... "When I was a child, if there was a ring around the sun or the moon, it meant the change of weather in the next few days. Better or worse, it was nature's message for the hunter."... Back to OSG News May 2002 Table of Contents Back to OSG News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2002 by Operational Studies Group This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com