A big part of Greenland's ice shelf has split away due to rising temperatures

A large section of Greenland's ice shelf has broken due to increasing climate changes in the country.

According to satellite footage the piece of ice from north-east Greenland, which was around 110 square km big, has been shattered.

The section came from the Artic's largest remaining ice shelf known as 79N or Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden which is 80 km long by 20 km wide.

A polar researcher at Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany, Dr Jenny Turton, told the BBC that "the atmosphere in this region has warmed by about 3C since 1980".

High sea levels caused by the breakage and then subsequent melting of the ice will cause more problems for ice structures. Not only would warmer waters mean that ice shelves would be melted from the underneath, but the liquid water can also open up cracks in the ice structure, which would weaken it.

Professor Jason Box, from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, said that: "What makes 79N so important is the way it's attached to the interior ice sheet, and that means that one day - if the climate warms as we expect - this region will probably become one of the major centres of action for the deglaciation of Greenland."

Earlier this year saw another ice shelf lose a significant part of its structure. Back in July, 80 square km broke from the Milne Ice Shelf in Canada.

The rapid melting occurring in Greenland was highlighted in a study last month. Data from US-German Grace-FO satellites tracked the weight of the ice sheet by monitoring the changes in the structure's mass due to shifts in gravity. In 2019, the study found that 79N was shedding approximately 530 billion tonnes of ice.