The
Larsen Ice Shelf is a long
ice shelf in the
Weddell Sea, extending along the east coast of the
Antarctic Peninsula. It is named after Norwegian explorer
Carl Anton Larsen, who sailed along the ice front in 1893. Composed of a series of shelves along the coast, named with letters from A to G, since the mid-1990s the Larsen Ice Shelf has been disintegrating, with the collapse of Larsen B in 2002 being particularly dramatic. A large section of the Larsen C shelf broke away in July 2017 to form an iceberg known as
A-68. The area of the whole Larsen Ice Shelf was formerly 33,000 square miles (85,000 km
2), but today is only 26,000 square miles (67,000 km
2).
Photograph: NASA/John Sonntag