1. Retreating ice shelves could be expected as a result of global warming, but are not in themselves evidence of it.

2. Huge pieces of the ice shelf break off and slowly melt into the sea.

3. The enormous Wilkins ice shelf is now barely attached to land.

4. Extensive cracks in Ward Hunt, the largest remaining ice shelf, means it will continue to disintegrate in the coming years, said Luke Copland, director Ottawa University's cryospheric research lab.

5. They are no longer held back by the ice shelf.

6. Canada's summer ice shelf losses now total 214 square kilometers (82.5 square miles), which is more than three times the area of Manhattan Island, the researchers said.

7. By the time the Marsh joins the immense Nimrod Glacier, some 35 miles from our camp, the ice is on a rapid charge to the Ross Sea Ice Shelf.

8. There it either breaks off into the water , or forms an ice shelf.

9. This pair of images from NASA's Landsat 7 satellite shows the dramatic impact the collapse had on many of the glaciers that fed the Larsen B Ice Shelf.

10. The last time such a large ice island formed was in 1962 when the Canadian Ward Hunt Ice Shelf calved an island.

11. They studied several ice streams in West Antarctica that lead into the Ross Ice Shelf.

12. Neil Young, an Australian Antarctic division glaciologist[], said: "The iceberg is likely to be part of one of the big ones that calved from the Ross ice shelf nearly a decade ago.

13. This new base, however, is more like an RV than an A-frame: Several ski-shod pods get towed back to their original positions as the ice shelf moves.

14. The last time such a large ice island formed was in 1962 when the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf calved an island. Smaller pieces of that chunk became lodged between real islands inside Nares Strait.

15. Measurements of ice thickness and seabed topography under the Fimbul Ice Shelf , Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica.

16. Once out of reach owing to the blanket of ice that entombed them, these resources look temptingly grabbable as climate change shrinks the ice shelf.