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on august 5th an enormous chunk of ice

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roughly 97 square miles in size broke

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off the petermann glacier along the

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northwestern coast of greenland

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the glacier lost about a quarter of its

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40-mile long floating ice shelf the

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largest in the northern hemisphere

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it's not unusual for large icebergs to

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cave off the petermann glacier but this

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new one is the largest to form in the

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so these changes are real and they're

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happening

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and what we're trying to do at nasa is

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like i say to go out and characterize

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this ice

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understand how it works how is it

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affected by ocean currents how is it

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affected by winds how is it affected by

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sunlight so that we can correlate that

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with the changes we see in the

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atmosphere and develop better predictive

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models now why should you care if you

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don't live in the arctic areas that's a

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really good question and the fact is

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this

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retreat the ice cover and you heat the

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ocean up with more sunlight you also

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have to think about there's going to be

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more water evaporating to the atmosphere

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there's a lot of other exchanges going

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on that's going to change the way that

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the earth's climate works and we expect

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weather patterns over north america to

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change

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now this stuff is very very difficult to

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model but the most recent model suggests

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is that if we lose the arctic ice hat we

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may have more drought in north america