Washington Post: In early 2002, scientists peering in on Antarctica from satellites saw something they found very alarming.
The Larsen B ice shelf, bigger than Rhode Island and 720 feet thick, underwent a sudden collapse in only 35 days (video here). It was following in the footsteps of the 1,500-square-kilometer Larsen A ice shelf, which collapsed in 1995, but Larsen B was more than two times larger.
The ice shelf, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, had likely existed for 12,000 years before...