NASA: The Antarctic Ice Shelf could collapse by 2020

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/05/15/this-antarctic-ice-shelf-could-collapse-by-2020-nasa-says/

It has been a really bad week for the ice shelves of the quickly warming Antarctic peninsula, the part of the vast frozen continent that extends northward toward South America.
Earlier this week, we learned that the gigantic marine-based Larsen C ice shelf, which is almost as big as Scotland, has several worrisome vulnerabilities — including a growing rift across it. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey and several other research centers say this could pose an “imminent risk” to its stability.
[This ice shelf is nearly the size of Scotland — and it could be at “imminent risk”]

And now, NASA scientists are giving an even worse verdict for the remnants of the nearby Larsen B ice shelf, much of which already disintegrated back in 2002. Back then, the shelf lost a region larger than Rhode Island, but there are still 618 square miles left of it — for now.
However, in a new study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, researchers with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California at Irvine say that this remnant now faces its “approaching demise.” In a news release, NASA adds that the ice shelf “is likely to disintegrate completely before the end of the decade.”