A roughly 2,000-square-mile block of ice just broke off in the Arctic Ocean.
The chunk, which sits in the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia, took just two days to separate from the surrounding ice.
And thanks to NASA, we can actually see it happen.
Here's the ice just three days ago, on March 12. You can see that it is just starting to crack and break up:
And here it is yesterday, on March 14:
Did you miss that?
Here's a side-by-side comparison, with March 12 on the left and March 14 on the right, with the ice chunk circled:
That's huge. It's about the size of Rhode Island and slightly smaller than Delaware.
Below is an illustration to put that into perspective. A roughly to-scale outline of Rhode Island is on the right:
While epic, the event is not that shocking.
Earth is now emerging from its warmest winter on record. The Northern Hemisphere in particular also just slipped past an alarming 2-degree-Celsius average temperature for the first time in history.
Polar regions like the Arctic are our canaries in the global-warming coal mine. We're already facing worldwide sea-level rise and extreme-weather events that are now officially linked to climate change.
If this isn't a wake-up call, we don't know what is.
h/t @PaulHBeckwith
