Huge Crack Discovered in Antarctic Glacier
By OurAmazingPlanet Staff Space.com | SPACE.com – Wed, Nov 2, 2011
This week I read an article about a very large new crack discovered in the Antarctic Glacier. The crack was spotted from an airplane flying over the Antarctic. The plane had come from Chile to take pictures of the area for scientists to study the polar ice as. Scientists have a way for figuring out how long deep and wide the glacier is by just taking a 3-D picture of it using an Airborne Topographic Mapper instrument. I would say that this is a pretty big crack in the glacier. It is 18 miles long and the deepest point of the crack is 195 feet.
The process of the glacier splitting is called calving. This means that a piece of the glacier will break off. When that happens to this new crack, the new glacier will have a surface area of about 340 square miles. Most of this new glacier will be underwater.
When I saw the picture and read the article, I wondered if the crack was caused by global warming. I’m sure scientists are now studying this. I realize more than ever that we need to take better care of our environment because if all the ice caps and glaciers melt the sea levels will rise and flood coastal areas. I wonder if landlocked areas would be affected as well by climate changes and migration from coastal areas. I think this could be a big problem in the future and am glad that scientists have discovered this new crack and are studying it.
I think it's great that we can use technology from above the ice caps to study them and to plot their movement and anything that occurs there.
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