WASHINGTON, Sept 22: The largest ice shelf in the Arctic, a solid feature for 3,000 years, has broken up, scientists in the United States and Canada said on Monday.

They said the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, on the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada’s Nunavut territory, broke into two main parts, themselves cut through with fissures. A freshwater lake drained into the sea, the researchers reported.

Large ice islands also calved off from the shelf and some are large enough to be dangerous to shipping and to drilling platforms in the Beaufort Sea.

Local warming of the climate is to blame, they said — adding that they did not have the evidence needed to link the melting ice to the steady, planet-wide climate change known as global warming.

Warwick Vincent and Derek Mueller of Laval University in Quebec City, Canada, and Martin Jeffries of the University of Alaska Fairbanks lived at the site, flew over it and used radar satellite imaging for their study.—Reuters