Why Pine Island glacier is wrecking

Satellites proved why Pine Island glacier, in Antarctica, is wrecking and giving birth to some huge icebergs. According to a research published on “The Cryosphere”, the EU’s magazine about geoscience, the glacier lost the connection with the mainland because of the presence of mountains underwater. Satellites’ monitoring revealed that seafloor is no more covered with ice. 

The team of researchers was lead by Jan Erik Arndt. Scientists from the German institute Alfred Wegener for marine and polar research made a map of seafloor with the help of the icebreaker ship Polarstern. So they compared their data with satellites’ ones in order to locate glacier’s weak points. Thanks to satellites, researchers could spy 1.000 m underwater, finding two mountains whose peaks reaches 370 m deep. Collisions between the glacier and the mountains create huge fractures in the ice. 

Pine Island glacier is 55 km long and it is one of the biggest in the world. Scientists focused on it because its melting contributes to the sea rising for about 5-10%. During the last eleven years, four icebergs broke away from the glacier. According to Arndt, «the direction and the speed of these fractures are provoked by underwater topography». «Thanks to 2017 expedition and to the satellites - Arndt said - we finally can map a 370 km area of seafloor».