In environmental news, the head of the UN’s climate change body is renewing calls for restrictions on carbon emissions to stave off global warming’s effects on the polar ice caps. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chair and Nobel laureate Rajendra Pachauri spoke after new images showed the collapse of a massive chunk of ice in the Antarctic.

Rajendra Pachauri: “There is enough evidence to show that there is accelerated melting of some of these large bodies of ice — West Antarctic ice sheet, the Greenland ice sheet. And as you know, we have in our synthesis report of the IPCC clearly mentioned the possibility of irreversible and abrupt changes, which could be essentially a collapse of some of these large bodies of ice that will result in several meters of increase in sea level.”

The British Antarctic Survey says the area of the Wilkins Ice Shelf is about seven times the size of Manhattan. It began breaking off in late February after being there for perhaps 1,500 years. Scientists say the rest of the Wilkins Ice Shelf is maintained only by narrow beams of thin ice and may collapse entirely.