'It could be catastrophic': Woman says natural supplement contained hidden painkiller drug
A Manitoba woman thought she found a miracle natural supplement, but said a hidden ingredient wreaked havoc on her health.
It was a near-miss of gigantic proportions.
The A-74 iceberg, which is about twice the size of Toronto, recently crashed into part of Antarctica, in what the European Space Agency (ESA) describes as a ‘minor impact.’
If the collision had been more severe, another huge iceberg could have calved, or broken off of, the Brunt Ice Shelf on the western coast of the continent.
“The nose-shaped piece of the ice shelf, which is even larger than A-74 remains connected to the Brunt Ice Shelf, but barely,” Mark Drinkwater, an ESA geophysicist, said in a report dated Aug. 20. “If the berg had collided more violently with this piece, it could have accelerated the fracture of the remaining ice bridge, causing it to break away.”
The A-74 iceberg, which at 1,270 square kilometres is one of the largest in the world, originally split from the ice shelf in February and had been drifting nearby until easterly winds caused it to shift its course from Aug. 9 to Aug. 18.
The Brunt Ice Shelf was home to the British Antarctic Survey’s Halley VI Research station until 2017, when it was deemed unsafe. The team then moved their station about 20 kilometres away from Chasm 1, a large crack running northwards from the southernmost part of the ice shelf.
The ESA plans to continue to monitor the situation using Sentinel satellite imagery.
They aren’t the only ones watching.
David Long and his students run the Antarctic Iceberg Tracking Database (AITD) at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. They’re tracking 51 active Antarctic icebergs.
“Ice in Antarctica is a bellwether for global climate change,” Long said by email on Thursday. “As the oceans warm, the major floating ice sheets and glaciers melt from beneath and become unstable. This can lead to their breakup and the rapid release of land glacial ice stored behind them. This release will cause sea levels around the world to rise.”
While the calving of the Brunt Ice Shelf may allow the land glaciers to flow more rapidly to the sea and increase the global sea level, the minor incident with theA-74 iceberg is not a particular concern for the area, he said.
Scheridan Cloward, the AITD's lead data analyst, is currently in charge of the real-time tracking of A-74. She said it’s following the polar current around Antarctica, which is to be expected.
“A-74 is in the area of the Weddell Sea, which we lovingly call ‘Iceberg Alley,’ as the combination of the polar currents and the Antarctic Peninsula create a thoroughfare for icebergs to pick up speed and make their way out towards open ocean,” she said by email on Thursday.
“The brief touch with the other point of the Brunt Ice Shelf is the impressive part,” Cloward said. “The fact that A-74 barely touched the other ice shelf without causing breakage or calving is notable. In contrast, D-28 collided with an ice shelf back in June of this year and caused five new icebergs to calve.”
The A-74 iceberg is expected to continue moving along the coast and to eventually go out to the Wendell Sea, although it’s not known how long the process will take, Cloward said.
Karen Alley, an assistant professor with the University of Manitoba’s Department of Environment and Geography in Winnipeg, said the calving of a large iceberg doesn’t mean the ice shelf itself is in danger of collapsing.
“The Brunt Ice Shelf is not rapidly thinning due to ocean or atmospheric warming, and while it normally loses a lot of mass to calving, that mass is replaced by ice flow from the continent at about the same rate as it breaks off,” Alley said by email on Thursday.
Glaciers and ice shelves that reach the ocean all calve periodically, but large calving events are rare and so it can be difficult to tell if they are a sign of change or normal behaviour, she said.
There aren’t any massive ice shelves in North America that are comparable to the Brunt Ice Shelf. However, many glaciers in Canada, Greenland and other parts of the Arctic do release smaller icebergs.
“These icebergs can be a navigational hazard, so it's important to monitor their movements and understand the calving processes that create them in order to predict future iceberg changes in a warming Arctic,” Alley said.
“Many parts of Antarctica are melting and retreating rapidly, making the Antarctic Ice Sheet the largest concern for sea-level rise over the next few centuries,” Alley said. “The region where the Brunt Ice Shelf is located is a fairly stable part of Antarctica, making it likely that large calving events there are not of global concern.”
A Manitoba woman thought she found a miracle natural supplement, but said a hidden ingredient wreaked havoc on her health.
Hospital chaplain J.S. Park opens up about death, grief and hearing thousands of last words, and shares his advice for the living.
The World Health Organization is likely to issue a wider warning about contaminated Johnson and Johnson-made children's cough syrup found in Nigeria last week, it said in an email.
Canada called for 'all parties' to de-escalate rising tensions in the Mideast following an apparent Israeli drone attack against Iran overnight.
A woman who recently moved to Canada from India was searching for a job when she got caught in an online job scam and lost $15,000.
More money will land in the pockets of some Canadian families on Friday for the latest Canada Child Benefit installment.
The World Health Organization and around 500 experts have agreed for the first time on what it means for a disease to spread through the air, in a bid to avoid the confusion early in the COVID-19 pandemic that some scientists have said cost lives.
American millionaire Jonathan Lehrer, one of two men charged in the killings of a Canadian couple in Dominica, has been denied bail.
Group of Seven foreign ministers warned of new sanctions against Iran on Friday for its drone and missile attack on Israel, and urged both sides to avoid an escalation of the conflict.
At 6'8" and 350 pounds, there is nothing typical about UBC offensive lineman Giovanni Manu, who was born in Tonga and went to high school in Pitt Meadows.
Kevin the cat has been reunited with his family after enduring a harrowing three-day ordeal while lost at Toronto Pearson International Airport earlier this week.
Molly Knight, a grade four student in Nova Scotia, noticed her school library did not have many books on female athletes, so she started her own book drive in hopes of changing that.
Almost 7,000 bars of pure gold were stolen from Pearson International Airport exactly one year ago during an elaborate heist, but so far only a tiny fraction of that stolen loot has been found.
When Les Robertson was walking home from the gym in North Vancouver's Lower Lonsdale neighbourhood three weeks ago, he did a double take. Standing near a burrow it had dug in a vacant lot near East 1st Street and St. Georges Avenue was a yellow-bellied marmot.
A moulting seal who was relocated after drawing daily crowds of onlookers in Greater Victoria has made a surprise return, after what officials described as an 'astonishing' six-day journey.
Just steps from Parliament Hill is a barber shop that for the last 100 years has catered to everyone from prime ministers to tourists.
A high score on a Foo Fighters pinball machine has Edmonton player Dave Formenti on a high.
A compound used to treat sour gas that's been linked to fertility issues in cattle has been found throughout groundwater in the Prairies, according to a new study.