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Science Quote by Ian Allison

"Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off - I'm talking 100km or 200km long - every 10 or 20 or 50 years"

About this Quote

The sentence does a quiet kind of damage: it makes catastrophe sound like housekeeping. Ian Allison, speaking as a scientist, chooses the language of cycles and precedent - “episodic,” “every 10 or 20 or 50 years” - to pin a spectacular image (a 200-kilometer slab of ice tearing away) to something almost routine. That’s the specific intent: to de-dramatize calving as a known behavior of ice shelves, a process that predates today’s climate anxiety and shouldn’t automatically be read as proof-of-apocalypse.

But the subtext is where it gets interesting. The casual scale-flex (“I’m talking 100km or 200km long”) works like a corrective to media narration. It’s an implicit rebuttal to the headline impulse that treats any big iceberg as a climate plot twist. By emphasizing infrequency and natural “carvings,” Allison is drawing a boundary between an event and a trend: one glacier’s spectacular break is not, by itself, a diagnosis.

Context matters because this framing can land two ways in public discourse. In scientific terms, he’s signaling baseline variability: ice shelves do shed enormous bergs, and that alone doesn’t quantify acceleration. In political terms, that same baseline talk can be cherry-picked to imply “nothing to see here.” The rhetorical tightrope is familiar in climate communication: accuracy demands caveats, while the culture rewards certainty. Allison’s restraint is both his credibility and his vulnerability.

Quote Details

TopicOcean & Sea
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Allison, Ian. (2026, January 15). Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off - I'm talking 100km or 200km long - every 10 or 20 or 50 years. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ice-shelves-in-general-have-episodic-carvings-and-169439/

Chicago Style
Allison, Ian. "Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off - I'm talking 100km or 200km long - every 10 or 20 or 50 years." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ice-shelves-in-general-have-episodic-carvings-and-169439/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off - I'm talking 100km or 200km long - every 10 or 20 or 50 years." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ice-shelves-in-general-have-episodic-carvings-and-169439/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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Ice shelves have episodic carvings and large icebergs break off
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About the Author

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Ian Allison is a Scientist from Australia.

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