Some 220 square miles of ice has collapsed in Antarctica and an ice shelf about seven times the size of Manhattan is "hanging by a thread," the British Antarctic Survey said Tuesday, blaming global warming.
Scientists say the rest of the ice shelf is hanging on by a thin beam of ice and is also in danger of collapsing.
"We are in for a lot more events like this," said professor Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Scambos alerted the British Antarctic Survey after he noticed part of the Wilkins ice shelf disintegrating on February 28, when he was looking at NASA satellite images.
Late February marks the end of summer at the South Pole and is the time when such events are most likely, he said. 
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"The amazing thing was, we saw it within hours of it beginning, in between the morning and the afternoon pictures of that day,"
