After 15 years of retreat, a huge sheet of ice is finally crumbling in Antarctica. The Wilkins is the eighth and largest ice shelf to fracture and fall apart in the last two decades along the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula.

The pattern of breakup, where the ice remains stable for centuries or even millennia, then almost over night, shatters into millions of bits like broken glass, is foreshadowing the fate of our northern ice floating in the Arctic.