More scary news from the southern tip of our planet. News we’ve been expecting. An ice bridge linking a shelf of ice the size of Jamaica to an island in Antarctica has broken. Researchers are saying that the collapse could mean that the Wilkins Ice Shelf is on the verge of completely breaking away. The Wilkins ice shelf has been retreating for the last two decades, but this is the first time it has lost one of the connections that keeps it in place.It snapped at the thinnest point of the 25 mile wide strip of ice.

Recently revealed European Space Agency satellite image shows newly created icebergs floating in the sea on the western side of the Antarctic peninsula, which juts up from the continent towards South America’s southern tip.

While this shelf break won’t necessarily have an impact on sea level, it increases the already intense concerns about the impact of climate change on this part of Antarctica. The Antarctic Peninsula has experienced unprecedented warming over the last 50 years and a number of Antarctic ice shelves have retreated in the past 30 years, with six of them collapsing entirely.

Who’s ready for panic time? I know, I know, I’ve officially become part of the fear-mongering media but this one doesn’t sound like the type of story you’d want to ignore.

As we reported earlier the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder has satellite imagery showing a 5,282 square mile Antarctic ice shelf has started collapsing.

Now, geophysicists out of the University of Toronto have done research that indicates that the collapse of this Antarctic ice shelf could result in an actual shift in the Earth’s axis. Holy shift!

Their research, which will be published today in the journal Science, shows that when sea levels rise after the ice shelf collapse the Earth’s rotation could be affected.

A press release from the University of Toronto’s physics department goes on to state that, “The melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will actually cause the Earth´s rotation axis to shift rather dramatically — approximately 500 metres from its present position if the entire ice sheet melts.”

Geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica continues, saying previous analysis was likely too conservative and that many coastal regions will see water levels rise by 25 percent more than expected, for a total of six to seven meters.

“That’s a lot of additional water, particularly around such highly populated areas as Washington, D.C., New York City, and the California coastline,” Mitrovica stated.

A massive Antarctic ice shelf is on the brink of collapsing with just a thin sliver of ice holding it in place. The Wilkins Ice Shelf is one of the many victims of global warming which is now in the process of forever altering maps of the long-frozen continent.

“We’ve come to the Wilkins Ice Shelf to see its final death throes,” said David Vaughan, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey after the last plane landed near the narrowest part of the ice.

The flat-top shelf has an area of thousands of square kilometers, jutting 65 ft out of the sea off the Antarctic Peninsula. But recently it is only held there by a thinning 25-mile strip of ice that has eroded to just 500 meters wide at its narrowest point.

In 1950, the strip was almost 100 km wide. The Wilkins Ice Shelf once covered 6,000 sq miles. It has lost a third of its area but is still about the size of Jamaica. Once the strip breaks up, the ocean will sweep away most of the remaining ice. In total, about 25,000 sq km of ice shelves have been lost, changing maps of Antarctica. Here’s a video of the Antarctic Wilkins Ice Shelf collapsing.