I usually don’t like ice in my drink. Mainly cause all I drink is beer and coffee and I like my coffee hot and my beer not watered down. And I think the ocean is like me, except it doesn’t drink beer. Or coffee. I mean, it would if you pour it in it but that wouldn’t be actually ‘drinking’ it perse,  you know what I’m saying? Me neither. The point here is, that a huge chunk of ice broke off from some Greenland glacier and fell into the ocean forming an ice island four times the size of Manhattan. This is the biggest chunk of ice breaking off Greenland in almost 50 years and could have some serious repercussions on the global weather. Or maybe not, I don’t know. I read somewhere that when an iceberg floats into the ocean it changes the global weather, the bigger the ice chunk, the harsher the climate change impact. You can actually read more about this HERE, from a similar incident 6 months ago in Antarctica that was supposed to change the world’s weather back then. Well, Russia is on fire thanks to a heat wave, isn’t it? and we are getting a bunch of stormy floods too in different parts of the world, so maybe the weather did changed, I mean, it wasn’t like this 20 years ago, was it? No it wasn’t!

Hit the break to find out more about the ice cube and get paranoid!

The ice island has an area of 100 square miles and a thickness of up to half the height of the Empire State Building, said Andreas Muenchow, professor of ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware.

Mr Muenchow said he had expected an ice chunk to break off from the Petermann Glacier, one of the two largest remaining ones in Greenland, because it had been growing in size for seven or eight years. But he did not expect it to be so large.

“The freshwater stored in this ice island could keep the Delaware or Hudson Rivers flowing for more than two years,” said Mr Muenchow

“It could also keep all US public tap water flowing for 120 days.”

Damn! that’s a lot of ice! Imagine how many whiskeys on the rocks you can fix with all that ice? That’s like… like…  heck, I don’t know, I pretty much suck at math but that’s a lot of ice! Now imagine how that will affect the global climate! Floods!! Heat waves!!! Are you scared yet?

How about now?

Nothing?

Damn…  Well, don’t say I didn’t tried.

The flow of seawater below the glaciers is one of the main causes of ice calvings off Greenland.

“Nobody can claim this was caused by global warming. On the other hand nobody can claim that it wasn’t,” Mr Muenchow said.

Scientists have said the first six months of 2010 have been the hottest globally on record. The El Nino weather pattern has contributed to higher temperatures, but many scientists say elevated levels of man-made greenhouse gases are pushing temperatures higher.

Sure they are, and Al Gore is the tooth fairy in his spare time. I thought the sun waking up was responsible for the high temperatures! Besides global warming was proved a scam, wasn’t it? I’m kinda confused.

Anyway, visit telegraph.co.uk to read the entire article (Huge ice island breaks from Greenland glacier) while me and my sign go panic outside for a minute, with some luck, some neighbors will join me and we’ll panic together.

Image courtesy of telegraph.co.uk, animated GIF courtesy of redcrow design.