lost about 6 percent of its surface a decade ago , the British Antarctic Survey said in a statement on its Web site Another 220 square miles -- including the chunk that Scambos spotted -- had splintered from the ice shelf as of March 8 , the group said . `` As of mid-March , only a narrow strip of shelf ice was protecting several thousand kilometers of potential further breakup , '' the group said . Scambos ' center put the size of the threatened shelf at about 5,282 square miles , comparable to the state of Connecticut , or about half the area of Scotland . See a map and photos as the collapse progressed '' Once Scambos called the British Antarctic Survey , the group sent an aircraft on a reconnaissance mission to examine the extent of the breakout . `` We flew along the main crack and observed the sheer scale of movement from the breakage , '' said Jim Elliott , according to the group 's Web site . `` Big hefty chunks of ice , the size of small houses , look as though they 've been thrown around like rubble -- it 's
-LRB- CNN -RRB- -- Some 220 square miles of ice has collapsed in Antarctica and an ice shelf about seven times the size of Manhattan is `` hanging by a thread , '' the British Antarctic Survey said Tuesday , blaming global warming . Scientists say the size of the threatened shelf is about 5,282 square miles . `` We are in for a lot more events like this , '' said professor Ted Scambos , a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder . Scambos alerted the British Antarctic Survey after he noticed part of the Wilkins ice shelf disintegrating on February 28 , when he was looking at NASA satellite images . Late February marks the end of summer at the South Pole and is the time when such events are most likely , he said . Watch aerial footage of the area '' `` The amazing thing was , we saw it within hours of it beginning , in between the morning and the afternoon pictures of that day , '' Scambos said of the large chunk that broke away on February 28 . The Wilkins ice shelf