Wilkins Ice Shelf hanging by its l...(tish Antarctic Survey (BAS) said: Wilki...)

"Current events are showing that we were being too conservative, when we made the prediction in the early 1990s that Wilkins Ice Shelf would be lost within thirty years - the truth is it is going more quickly than we guessed."

The Wilkins Ice Shelf, a broad plate of floating ice south of South America on the Antarctic Peninsula that is connected to Charcot and Latady Islands, had been stable for most of the last century before it began retreating in the 1990s.

By studying ESA ERS SAR satellite images since the 1990s, Braun and his colleague Dr Angelika Humbert from the Institute of Geophysics, Mnster University, have found the Wilkins Ice Shelf has break-up events with loss of large areas rather than underlying ordinary, continuous calving.

For instance, in February 2008 an area of about 400 km broke off from the Wilkins Ice Shelf, narrowing the ice bridge that connects it to Charcot and Latady Islands down to a 6 km strip. From 30 to 31 May 2008 it experienced further break-up with an area of about 160 km breaking off, reducing the ice bridge to just 2.7 km.

Braun and Humbert are monitoring the ice sheet daily via Envisat acquisitions as part of their contribution to the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2008, a large worldwide science programme focused on the Arctic and Antarctic.

Satellite data are essential for observing polar regions. Envisat's ASAR instrument is able to produce high-quality images, even through clouds and darkness. Therefore, it is particularly suited to acquire images over Antarctica during the local winter period where hours of daylight are limited and cloud cover is quite frequent.

"ESA provides daily ASAR images that are easily acc
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