A chuck of ice measuring 7 square miles broke off a Canadian ice shelf in the arctic yesterday. The sheet broke away from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf off the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada’s far north.

Derek Mueller, a polar scientist and research fellow at Trent University explained that a crack in the shelf was first spotted in 2002. This is the biggest chunk of ice to break away from one of Canada’s six ice shelves since the Ayles shelf broke loose in 2005.

“Ice shelves don’t just break up. There’s no karate chop,” he said. “This is the result of a gradual weakening over time as a result of warming temperatures.”

“We’re in a different climate now…. “It’s not conducive to regrowing them. It’s a one-way process.”

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Related:

Inconvenient Truth of the Day
Huge Ice Sheet Breaks Loose in Arctic
Ice sheet breaks loose off Canada

The Will Steger Foundation, created to educate about climate change, has created the Global Warming 101 initiative (and a ultra-interactive website of the same name), which documents trips through arctic regions to highlight the changing landscape that comes with climate change. Right now at the initiative’s website you can see video and listen to audio of the current expedition, which consists of

six emerging leaders, ages 21-28…join[ing] Will Steger on a 1,400 mile international dogsled expedition across Ellesmere Island . There they will follow in the footsteps of legendary polar explorers and will visit ice shelves that have collapsed due to global warming and those that are on the brink of collapse.

Let’s hope they bring back some penguins next time they go to the Antarctic. Cause I read a book once where this guy had penguins, and they could do tricks, and it seemed pretty awesome.

To see a video of Will Steger, and learn about his vision, there’s a video clip after the jump.

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