Over a hundred ice burgs are drifting from Antarctica to New Zealand. Scientist Neal Young told the AFP that these icebergs, some of which are more than 200 meters wide, were seen in just one cluster, meaning that there could be hundreds more. The icebergs are the remains of a massive ice floe which split from the Antarctic as sea and air temperatures rose due to global warming. “It’s done a long circuit around Antarctica and now the bigger parts of it are breaking up and producing smaller ones. “Icebergs had not floated close to New Zealand in 2006, when a number came within 25 kilometres of the coastline, before that however, none had been sighted since 1931. Coastal navigation warnings have been issued for the area in the Southern Ocean where the icebergs have been sighted.
This is not the only sign of global warming that New Zealand has been alerted to in the past week. The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa)’s annual end-of-summer survey of the snowline on key South Island glaciers showed they lost much more ice than they gained between April 2008 and March 2009. This year’s snowline was, on average, 95 metres above where it needed to be to keep the ice mass constant, Niwa said. According to snow and ice scientist Jordy Hendrikx, above-normal temperatures, near or below-normal rainfall and above-normal sunshine were among the reasons for the continued shrinking. Niwa has photographed 50 glaciers in the Southern Alps and Kaikoura area of the South Island. Over the past 33 years, there has been an overall decrease in the glacier mass balance, despite periods where the balance had increased for a few years.
