As the Republican Party denies, denies, denies that global warming is real: Canada’s Arctic ice shelves breaking up fast.

Luke Copland, an associate geography professor at the University of Ottawa, said the Serson Ice Shelf shrank from 79 square miles to two remnant sections five years ago, and was further diminished this past summer.

Serson went from a 16-square-mile floating glacier tongue to 10 square miles, and the second section from 13 square miles to 2 square miles.

In addition, Ward Hunt Ice Shelf’s central area disintegrated into drifting ice masses last summer, leaving two separate ice shelves measuring 88 and 29 square miles respectively, reduced from 132 square miles the previous year.

“It has dramatically broken apart in two separate areas and there’s nothing in between now but water,” said Copland.

Copland said those two losses are significant, especially since the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf has always been the biggest, the farthest north and the one scientists thought might have been the most stable.

“Since the end of July, pieces equaling one and a half times the size of Manhattan Island have broken off,” Copland said in a statement. Copland uses satellite imagery and has conducted field work in the Arctic every May for the past five years.

Co-researcher Derek Mueller, an assistant professor at Carleton University, said the loss this past summer equals up to three billion tons of ice.

“This is our coastline changing,” Mueller stated. “These unique and massive geographical features that we consider to be part of the map of Canada are disappearing and they won’t come back.”

“Recent (ice shelf) loss has been very rapid, and goes hand-in-hand with the rapid sea ice decline we have seen in this decade and the increasing warmth and extensive melt in the Arctic regions,” said Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, remarking on the research.