More ice

The Ward Hunt ice shelf, located 500 miles from the North Pole on the edge of Canada’s Ellesmere Island, has broken into two main parts and a series of massive ice islands. This is the largest ice separation in the Arctic, occurring in an area of the eastern Arctic long thought to be more protected against the gradual warming of the planet. This type of catastrophic event, affecting the largest ice shelf in the Arctic, provides more evidence that the Earth’s polar regions are responding to ongoing and accelerating rates of climatic change.