Larsen B, likely due to the removal of a buttressing effect of the ice shelf. Data collected in 2007 by an international team of investigators through satellite-based radar measurements suggests that the overall ice-sheet mass balance in Antarctica is increasingly negative. Breakup The Larsen disintegration events were unusual by past standards. Typically, ice shelves lose mass by iceberg calving and by melting at their upper and lower surfaces. The disintegration events were linked by The Independent newspaper in 2005 to ongoing climate warming in the Antarctic Peninsula, about 0.5˚C (0.9˚F) per decade since the late 1940s. According to a paper published in Journal of Climate in 2006, the peninsula at Faraday station warmed by 2.94˚C (5.3˚F) from 1951 to 2004, much faster than Antarctica as a whole and faster than the global trend; anthropogenic global warming causes this localized warming through a strengthening of the winds circling the Antarctic. Larsen A The Larsen A ice shelf disintegrated in January 1995. Larsen B From 31 January 2002 to March 2002 the Larsen B sector partially collapsed and parts broke up, of ice thick, an area comparable to the US state of Rhode Island. In 2015, a study concluded that the remaining Larsen B ice-shelf would disintegrate by 2020, based on observations of faster flow and rapid thinning of glaciers in the area. Larsen B was stable for at least 10,000 years, essentially the entire Holocene period since the last glacial period. By contrast, Larsen A was absent for a significant part of that period, reforming about 4,000 years ago. Despite its great age, the Larsen B was clearly in trouble at the time of the collapse. With warm currents eating away the underside of the shelf, it had become a "hotspot of global warming". It broke over a period of three weeks or less, with a factor in this fast break-up being the powerful effects of water; ponds of meltwater formed on the surface during the near 24 hours of daylight in the summertime, flowed down into cracks and, acting like a multitude of wedges, levered the shelf apart. Other likely factors in the break-up were the higher ocean temperatures and the decline of the ice of the peninsula. In the austral winter of 2011, a large expanse of sea ice formed over the embayment that was once covered by the land-fast shelf of fresh-water glacial ice of Larsen B. This