A big break-up

A seven square-mile chunk of ice broke off a Canadian ice shelf in the Arctic in late July. The piece took its leave of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf off Ellesmere Island, becoming the biggest sheet to break off one of Canada’s six ice shelves since 2005. Derek Mueller, a researcher at Trent University, told the Associated Press that the Ward Hunt shelf has been steadily declining since the 1930s. He’s not attributing it to global warming, but he does say “we’re in a different climate now.”