Huge ice island could pose threat to oil, shipping

The largest ice island in almost 50 years poses no immediate threat as it will take up to two years to drift through the Arctic Ocean, the Canadian who discovered it told AFP on Wednesday.Trudy Wohlleben, a forecaster from the Canadian Ice Service, spotted the massive slab of ice that broke off a glacier in Greenland last week as she analyzed raw data from a NASA satellite.At about 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) long and 10 kilometers wide, the ice island is about four times the size of Manhattan and experts say the last time the Arctic lost such a large chunk was in 1962.

In mid-July this year, a roar echoed around one of the most remote inlets of northern Greenland -- and an island was born. No ordinary island, but a huge chunk of ice, roughly twice the size of Manhattan, that had broken from the Petermann Glacier.

Environmental watchdog Greenpeace said Thursday it was expecting the disintegration of the Petermann glacier in north-western Greenland, from which a massive ice island four times the size of Manhattan broke off earlier this month."We had been expecting since last year that unavoidable break of the edge of the glacier, which we studied closely with an international team of researchers during an expedition in July and August 2009," Mads Flarup Christensen, who heads Greenpeace in the Nordic countries, told AFP.

A massive ice island four times the size of Manhattan has broken off an iceberg in north-western Greenland, a researcher at a US university said.Andreas Muenchow at the University of Delaware said in a statement Friday that the last time the Arctic lost such a large chunk of ice was in 1962.Muenchow's research focuses on the Nares Strait, a region between far north-eastern Canada and northwestern Greenland, about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) south of the North Pole.

By the time today's babies graduate college, there's a very good chance they could celebrate with a cruise across the North Pole.

Amateur photographer Christian Grosso got a surprise recently when he visited a glacier in Argentina's Patagonia region: an enormous ice bridge connected to the glacier ruptured and fell, causing a huge wave in the lake below. Luckily he had his camera to capture the event. And another visitor caught a video of the ice falling.