Eye-opening photos released this week of a shrinking glacier in Greenland is alarming scientists worldwide.
A researcher flew over the Petermann Glacier this month, the same one that had a massive ice island four times the size of Manhattan break off last year.
What he found stunned him. The 12-mile span between 3,000 foot rock cliffs that was once filled with an ice shelf is now close to empty.
"Although I knew what to expect in terms of ice loss from satellite imagery, I was still completely unprepared for the gob-smacking scale of the breakup, which rendered me speechless," said researcher Alun Hubbard of Aberystwyth University in Wales.
Another scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University took Hubbard's photos and compared them to sets taken in 2009. The stark comparisons show the ice marching backwards in an animation fading from the 2009 photo to the present day.
Hubbard also told MSNBC.com another chunk of ice is set to break off again soon, this one about twice the size of Manhattan.
"I think the far northwest of Greenland is seeing a kind of new regime of climate," he said.
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