Montreal, Dec 30: An enormous ice shelf broke away from Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic last year, researchers said, warning it could be another symptom of global warming.
The 66-square-kilometer (25.5-square-mile) ice island tore away from Ellesmere, a huge strip of land in the Canadian Arctic close to Greenland.
The break occurred in August 2005 and was so violent that it caused tremors that were detected by Canadian seismographs 250 kilometers (155 miles) away, but at the time no one was able to pinpoint what had happened.
The Canadian Ice Service contacted geographer Luke Copland of the University of Ottawa, who reconstructed the chain of events by piecing together data from the seismic readings and satellite images provided by Canada and the United States.
"This loss is the biggest in 25 years, but it continues the loss that occurred within the last century," Copland told, saying 90 percent of the the ice cover had been lost since the area was discovered in 1906.
"What is important and interesting is that it is sudden, quite large even," he said.
"In the past, we looked to climate change (and) thought perhaps ice shelves ... would just melt apart by losing a little piece day by day, but it now seems that when you reach some kind of threshold, when you reach that level, the whole thing just breaks apart."
Following the discovery, biologist Warwick Vincent of Laval University in Quebec, visited the icy waters of the Arctic to view the "new island."
Vincent said he had seen nothing like it in the past decade. "It really is incredible," Vincent was quoted as saying by the newspaper National Post.
Bureau Report
First Published: Saturday, December 30, 2006, 00:00