RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
A group of scientists are gathering this week in the U.K. to discuss a giant crack in Antarctica. It's a crack in an ice shelf there that could soon split off a frozen chunk the size of Delaware. Here's NPR's Rae Ellen Bichell to explain what it all means.
RAE ELLEN BICHELL, BYLINE: Last year, Heidi Sevestre spent six weeks living on a giant slab of ice attached to the Antarctic Peninsula.
HEIDI SEVESTRE: It's like being on a different planet. Everything is gigantic. Everything is white.
BICHELL: She and her colleagues would get really excited whenever they saw a bird pass overhead. Everything seemed so frozen and still, but it wasn't.
SEVESTRE: When you're camping on the ice shelf, you have no idea that you're on something that is floating and moving.
BICHELL: The ice shelf is in constant motion - rising with the tides, splitting off icebergs at its edges and growing again as inland glaciers add to it.
Sevestre is a glaciologist with the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The ice shelf she was studying is called Larsen C, and it now has a massive 90-mile-long crack running through it.
SEVESTRE: The big rift is slicing the ice shelf from top to bottom.
BICHELL: It's now a third of a mile deep and as wide across as 25 highway lanes. You might think this is just another sad climate change story, but, in fact, it's more complicated.
ADRIAN LUCKMAN: A lot of things are going on deep inside the ice.
BICHELL: That's Adrian Luckman, a glaciologist at Swansea University in the U.K. He's also leading a project to track changes in the ice shelf. He says climate change has influenced this region. Larsen C used to have two neighbors to the north - Larsen A and Larsen B. As the air and water warmed, those ice shelves started melting and then splintered into shards in 1995 and 2002. But the crack in Larsen C seems to have happened on its own.
LUCKMAN: This is probably not directly attributable to any warming in the region. Although, of course, the warming won't have helped.
BICHELL: Larsen C has a bunch of cracks - all ice shelves do. The one we're talking about has been around since at least the 1960s. The unusual part is that in 2014, this crack and only this crack started growing in spurts. Why?
LUCKMAN: Well, that is a little bit of a mystery, and that's why it drew itself to our attention.
BICHELL: It left other cracks in the dust about 50 miles ago. Now scientists are crunching the data collected from satellites and radar to figure out how.
LUCKMAN: And that knowledge will be useful in helping us to understand other ice shelves and how they might respond to rifts coming in to them.
BICHELL: Scientists are split on how important this crack is for the stability of the whole ice shelf. Some say if this giant section breaks off, it won't make a difference. But others say it could eventually cause the whole shelf to fall apart. And Heidi Sevestre says that scenario could be a problem because right now the ice shelf buttresses glaciers on land.
SEVESTRE: They are slowing down how much ice is coming from the land and goes into the water. So that's the very important role of these ice shelves.
BICHELL: She says according to pessimistic estimates, if the ice shelf completely disintegrated and if all the water packed in those glaciers made its way to the sea, it could significantly raise global sea levels.
SEVESTRE: It is quite a large impact indeed, yeah.
BICHELL: The 30 or so ice shelf experts gathered in the U.K. this week aren't sure whether this more serious chain reaction will happen. But they are confident, at least, that a Delaware-sized chunk will come off. The crack only has 10 miles left to go. Rae Ellen Bichell, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF HAUSCHKA'S "TAGTRAUM")