The disintegrating face
of the Müller Ice Shelf, Lallemand Fjord, Antarctic
Peninsula, 67° South, April 2, 1999. This small shelf, fed by
glaciers from the Loubet
Coast, has been receding
recently after growing over a 400-year cooling period. Like other receding ice
shelves such as the larger Larsen, it may be a sensitive monitor of rising
regional temperatures. The Larsen Ice Shelf lost a 1200 square mile section
early in 2002. Earlier in the 1990''s other huge sections of this shelf
disintegrated. In 2003 Argentine glaciologists reported that the land-based
glaciers exposed by the removal of those sections had surged rapidly into the
ocean. Thus, although ice shelves are floating and do not add to sea
level when they melt or break up, land based glaciers released by such events
definitely will add to sea level.