A massive iceberg, said to be as large as the United States state of Delaware split off from Antarctica’s Larsen C Shelf in the South Pole early this month. The iceberg is said to have an area of about 5,800 square kilometers – bigger than our Cebu island – and weighs over a trillion tons. While this process of iceberg calving is a natural one, the one that broke off was an unusually big one and scientists will be looking if it was due to climate change. There has been a marked increase in solar radiation absorbed in polar ice regions since the year 2000 and this has been attributed to increased carbon emissions by the world’s industrial nations. Thus, at the Paris Climate Change Conference of December, 2015, the world’s nations agreed to take steps to cut down their respective industrial emissions so as to limit rising global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

We have 7 endangered cities if ocean levels rise. (2017, July 19). Manila Bulletin, p. 12.