A floating plane of ice roughly six times the size of Manhattan Island has broken free and crumbled into the sea off the southwest coast of Antarctica. That collapse threatens the Wilkins Ice Shelf, a much larger sheet of ice, with break-up and melting.

Scientists say the prime culprit is global warming. This video, shot by a British expedition, shows how the collapse, which began in late February, has progressed.

The western Antarctic is the fastest-warming place on Earth. It's warmed at a rate of nearly one degree Fahrenheit per decade.

Satellite imagery shows the shelf's disintegration. The sky-blue coloring comes from the deep glacial ice, now exposed. The shelf is thought to have been in place for hundreds of years.

For more, we turn to Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University, and founder and editor of the journal Climatic Change. Schneider was also one of the lead authors on a serious of reports from the United Nations Panel on Climate Change. That panel shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Professor Schneider, a lot of attention has been turned to the Arctic Sea and Greenland. Is there loss of polar ice that's just as serious going on in the Antarctic region?

STEPHEN SCHNEIDER, Climatologist, Stanford University: Well, the Antarctic is getting more strongly in the act and not leaving the whole show up to the north. What we're seeing is a systematic pattern of bits of pieces of the shelf in Antarctica coming apart.

What do we mean by a shelf? Ice starts up on the land, on the continent, and then it flows out into the ocean. And it can be as tall as a big building. And then it gets stuck on risers or islands, and what that shelf does is it's floating. So if it melts, it's not going to raise the sea level, because anymore than melting the ice cube in your Coke would melt it.

But what it does do is it holds the ice on the land back. And now, when the shelf breaks up, it allows the ice on the land to flow more rapidly in the water. That could threaten several feet of sea level rise in the time frame of many decades, up to centuries.

That's what has people concerned. And the fact that the Antarctica is beginning to look more like it's part of the story, as well.

One thing is for sure a cooling trend will occur and then back to the warming trend this is the earths biosphere trying to compensate for humanities effects but it will not be able to balance as the rate of pollution is still climbing and we as humans have limited time if this is allowed to continue.

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