Liu, an associate professor who took the pictures using Formosat-2, told The China Post in an email that the perished portion of ice has left the Wilkins Shelf protected by "only a narrow beam 6 km wide (3.7 miles) of intact ice," from further breakup.
This has made Wilkins the largest ice shelf in the Antarctic Peninsula to be threatened so far.
High-resolution photo surveillance images were captured by the "Formosat-2" satellite -- launched by Taiwan's National Space Organization (NSPO) -- documenting the collapse, which continues to threaten a section of 5,600 square miles (14,500 sq km), roughly the size of Connecticut.
A large part of the Wilkins Ice Shelf began to break off on Feb. 28, with NASA issuing a request for countries around the world to focus any available high-resolution satellites on the shelf, the Formosat-2 operations center said.
Formosat-2 commenced photo-surveillance on March 8, producing images with a 2-meter resolution covering areas of up to 24 km, staff at the satellite's operations center said.
"What we worried most was something like what happened to Larsen B Ice Shelf," explained Liu, who is currently working at the Department of Earth Sciences at the National Cheng Kung University.
Larsen B was a larger, more dramatic ice collapse that occurred in 2002.
The collapse was a cause of alarm for scientists such as David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), who said last week "The ice shelf is hanging by a thread."
Liu agreed with the finding, adding however, that he is not concerned about a rise in sea level from the latest event, but says it is a sign of worsening global warming.
"Fortunately, Antarctica's summer melt season has come to a close. We do not expect the Wilkins to further disintegrate in the next several months. Therefore, the impact of this event is not the direct elevating of sea level," he wrote.
"Mother Nature is responding to the global warming in her own way and at her own pace. If this event can do anything good to reaching the consensus of Kyoto protocol, that would be the real impact."
When asked if the rapid breakup of the ice shelf is the direct result of global warming, Liu replied, "it is very likely."
"Most of the people know that the weather is getting hotter and hotter every year. But probably not many people know that the western Antarctic Peninsula has experienced the biggest temperature increase on Earth, rising by 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade."
National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) Lead Scientist Ted Scambos, who first spotted the disintegration in March, said, "We believe the Wilkins has been in place for at least a few hundred years. But warm air and exposure to ocean waves are causing a break-up."
Currently, the sea ice off Antarctica totals about 4 million square km, as against about 2.5 million sq km this time last year. Last year ended up having the largest sea ice cover since satellite measurements began in 1979.
Such occurrences are "more indicative of a tipping point or trigger in the climate system," said Sarah Das, a scientist at he Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
"These are things that are not re-forming," Das said. "So once they're gone, they're gone."
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