Deterioration
In October 1998, the iceberg A-38 broke off the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf. It had a size of roughly 150 by 50 km and was thus larger than Delaware. It later broke up into three parts. A similar-sized calving in May 2000 created an iceberg 167 by 32 km in extent, dubbed A-43 - the disintegration of this is thought to have been responsible for the November 2006 sighting of several large icebergs from the coast of the South Island of New Zealand, the first time that any icebergs had been observed from the New Zealand mainland since 1931. A large group of small icebergs (the largest some 1000 metres in length), were seen off the southeast coast of the island, with one of them drifting close enough to shore to be visible from the hills above the city of Dunedin. If these were indeed the remnants of this calving, then over the course of five and a half years they had travelled slowly north and also east around over half the globe, a journey of some 13,500 km.
From January 12 and January 13, 2010, an area of sea ice larger than the state of Rhode Island broke away from the Ronne-Filchner Ice Shelf and shattered into many smaller pieces. The Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites captured this event in this series of photo-like images.
The ice of the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf can be as thick as 600 m; the water below is about 1400 m deep at the deepest point.
The international Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf Programme (FRISP) was initiated in 1973 to study the ice shelf.
A study published in Nature in 2012 by scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, and funded by the Ice2Sea initiative, predicts the disappearance of the 450,000 km2 (170,000 sq mi) vast ice shelf in Antarctica by the end of the century which could add up to 4.4 mm (0.17 in) of rise of sea level each year due to its melting alone.
Read more about this topic: Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf