Green Daily

Look, I'm sorry to keep coming back with bad, scary news about global warming and melting ice, but this freakish, and it's news.

The Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica is about to collapse. And when it's gone, it's gone -- there's no getting the Antarctic cold enough again to regrow it.

This ice shelf used to be 6,000 square miles, but it has lost approximately a third of its mass. The remaining ice is held together by a 25 mile long strip of ice that was 100 kilometers wide in 1950. Today that strip is only 500 meters wide.

Let me repeat that: 100 kilometers down to 500 meters in 59 years. After surviving for thousands of years. That's a dramatic and serious change!

Glaciologists expect the narrow bridge to collapse any day now. Once that happens, the ocean will probably sweep away the remaining ice. The sliver of silver lining here is that this collapse won't raise sea levels because the ice is already floating. But there are other ice shelves that hold back glaciers, and if those go we'll see elevated sea levels.

The Wilkins Shelf is the 10th ice self in the Antarctic to recede or collapse since 1950. And probably not the last.