As mentioned in the last post, one of the two “canaries in the coal mine” that Al Gore talked about in An Inconvenient Truth was the rapid breakup of the Arctic ice shelf.

Gore went on to talk about the break up of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf.

Yesterday, scientists reported that the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf is not alone. The Ayles Ice Shelf, one of Canada’s six ice shelves, no longer exists.

What is so remarkable to me about this article is not just that this is happening, but the level of alarm that the scientists are expressing over this. These scientists know about what is happening to the Antarctic ice shelfs. They know about the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf. And yet, even with all of that knowledge, they are surprised at how quickly things happen: “What surprised us was how quickly it happened.”

An article in the National Post reported described how fast this change took place:

“It turned out it took less than an hour for the ice shelf to calve off in the early afternoon of Aug. 13, 2005″ … ‘If you were standing right on the edge of the shelf, there’d have been this huge 15-kilometre crack as far as you could see in both directions,’ says Copland. … Within an hour, the giant ice island was a kilometre offshore.”

What is even more remarkable is that we are just finding out about this now. What has happened in the last 15 months that we don’t yet know about?

Remember what Al predicted about exactly this sort of breakup? He described how the Earth’s climate is dramatically affected by the “ocean conveyor belt”.

He also described the potentially catastropic effects if this conveyor belt stopped working.