Animation using modified satellite images captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 to show the disintegration of the iceberg that calved off Pine Island Glacier in September 2017. (BAS/ESA)

At a Glance

In September, an iceberg four times the size of Manhattan, broke off the Antartica's Pine Island Glacier. Since then, the glacier has broken up into dozens of smaller icebergs.

Satellite images have captured the disintegration of the giant iceberg that broke off from the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica justtwo months ago.

Back in September, the icebergfour times the size of Manhattan broke free from the glacier, fueling concerns of a runaway ice retreat. The calving became the secondtime in two years the glacier lost such a large piece.

Two months later, the giant chunk of icehas crumbled into dozens of smaller pieces, show.

The breakup of the iceberg defies the expectations of scientists, who believed , reports the British Antarctic Society. Scientists say the giant iceberg became stuck by thick ice and didn't make it to the ocean before breaking up.

Greenhousegas emissions-driven global warming is being blamed for an incredible amount of ice lost each year in Antartica.

Pine Island, the fastest-melting glacier in Antarctica, loses an estimated 45 billion tons of ice each year to the ocean, which amountsto 1 millimeter of global sea level rise every eight years.

In astudy released last year, researchers Seongsu Jeong and Ian Howat of Ohio State University found that Pine Island Glacier was “.”

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The ice shelf had developed a new way of losing ice, the researchers noted, with riftsforming in the center of the huge glacier rather than along its edges, which suggested the warmer waters reaching the base of the glacier is undermining it.

“Rifts usually form at the margins of an ice shelf, where the ice is thin and subject to shearing that rips it apart,” said study leader, associate professor ofat Ohio State. “However, this latest event in the Pine Island Glacier was due to a rift that originated from the center of the ice shelf and propagated out to the margins. This implies that something weakened the center of the ice shelf, with the most likely explanation being a crevasse melted out at the bedrock level by a warming ocean.”

With each break, the glacier becomes more and more unstable, possibly leading to a runaway retreat in ice, the scientists said.