The sudden drainage of thousands of small lakes on the surface of Antarctic glaciers seems to have triggered the spectacular collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf in March 2012.

Some 3,000 small ponds of liquid water had emerged over the course of a decade on top of glaciers surrounding the ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula. These ponds disappeared in striking synchronicity a few days before the shelf's collapse.

When recreating the events in a computer simulation, Alison Banwell of the University of Chicago in Illinois and her colleagues found that the initial drainage of a single lake would have produced fractures in the ice that were capable of sucking dry neighbouring lakes, kicking off a catastrophic chain reaction.

The spread of fractures across the ice shelf may have ultimately caused its sudden demise, the authors suggest.

Geophys. Res. Lett. http://doi.org/p6c (2013)