text: The Larsen B ice shelf, off the east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, in 2008. Where the great ice sheet that covers Antarctica reaches the coast, it often extends many kilometres out over the Southern Ocean in huge floating platforms hundreds of metres thick, called ice shelves. The Larsen B ice shelf used to be over 11,500 square kilometres in area, but two-thirds of that disappeared within six weeks in a spectacular collapse in 2002. PHOTO Mariano Caravaca/Reuters/Landov