A US-led team of geologists had gathered a rich harvest of data around the Larson B ice shelf just before it’s spectacular collapse in 2002.

The researchers, reporting in Nature, the British science weekly, say that since the end of the last Ice Age, some 11,000 years ago, the ice shelf had been intact but had slowly thinned, by several dozen metres.

Its coup de grace came from a recent but decades-long rise in air temperature, they say.

The modern collapse of the LIS-B (Larsen B iceshelf) is a unique event within the Holocene. The LIS-B eventually thinned to the point where it succumbed to the prolonged period of regional warming now affecting the entire Antarctic Peninsula region.

The research is the latest in a series of studies to sound the alarm about the effects of climate change in Antarctica, where the bulk of the world’s fresh water is locked up.

The dilemma as Greens is that we have little control over the policies that create global warming. Republicans are in denial and Democrats are too tame to make any serius changes. Long term green planning may be reduced to making the best of the catastophe that is being bequethed upon us