The Pine Island Glacier – one of the largest in West Antarctica – has produced a new mass of ice over 100 kilometres in size.
The loss is the second time in two years that a huge chunk of ice has been separated from the main body.
Pine Island Glacier has an area of 175,000 square kilometres and loses about 45 billion tons of ice each year.
As it loses so much ice, scientists have been keeping an eye on it and over the weekend noticed that a piece of ice 266.7 square kilometres in size had been “calved” off – the island of Manhattan is 59 square kilometres.
Stef Lhermitte, a satellite observation specialist at Delft University of Technology, who has been monitoring the glacier, said: “It’s the fifth large calving event since 2000.
“This one and 2015, they were much further inland than the previous ones. So there has been a retreat of the calving front, specifically between 2011 and 2015.”
This is likely not to be the end of it either.
Ohio State glaciologist Ian Howat said that a series of smaller cracks have been noticed in the Pine Island Glacier which could lead to more cracks in the future.
He told the Washington Post: “A series of thin cracks was visible in the centre of the ice shelf about three kilometre inland of the current break in March 2017.
“We don’t have any more recent data to see what its status is. But this means that we would expect another calving event very soon.”
Climate change has been blamed for the thinning of the Pine Island Glacier as warmer waters chip away at the ice.
Scientists now fear that the damage may be irreversible, and as such will continue to monitor the situation.
Knut Christianson, a glaciologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said: “The persistence and net effect of this shift in calving behaviour has yet to be determined as it has only occurred during the past two years, but it clearly merits continued observation.”