A piece of ice the size of Delaware is about to break off Antarctica

(Image credit: Mark Ralston/Getty Images)

published 7 January 2017

A crack in Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf is growing at an accelerated pace and may break off an iceberg roughly the size of Delaware within a couple months. The crack is nearly 100 miles long. It has grown 50 miles since 2011, with nearly half of that growth occurring in the past six months alone. Now, just 12 miles of ice connect the broken piece to its larger ice mass.

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When the iceberg does break off, about 90 percent of the ice shelf will remain intact. However, researchers at Britain's Project MIDAS say if the entire ice shelf breaks up, its long-term effects could raise global sea levels by almost four inches.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.