[Stealth Hunter]

http://desicritics.org/2008/09/09/123429.php

A 19-square-mile (50 kilometers) ice shelf attached to an island in Canada's northern Arctic for thousands of years has broken from land, another sign of the effect of global warming, scientists said. Nearly the size of Manhattan, the 4,500-year-old Markham Ice Shelf separated from Ellesmere Island in early August and is now floating in the Arctic Ocean, said Luke Copeland, director of the Laboratory for Cryospheric Research at the University of Ottawa.


In January, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said net loss of ice mass in Antarctica increased to 196 billion metric tons in 2006 from 112 metric tons a decade earlier. To have a chance of containing the average worldwide increase in temperature to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) would require cutting global greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 85 percent by 2050, according to the UN panel. Ice shelves, which attach to land and float on the ocean's surface, form through the accumulation of snow and freezing water.

:hmm: