The specific mechanisms of those is pretty fascinating: During glaciation periods, ice dams would form, creating massive headwaters. The dams themselves would fail, as Hemming way, gradually, then suddenly: water would first start trickling through, then both erode and melt the dam, until its integrity was compromised and the entire face would fail.

Fascinating geology and scarily impressive traces. Makes me wonder what will happen on Greenland or Antarctica.

We're about to see a new piece of ice cleave off about the size of Delaware in Antartica. As ridiculous as that is, I think the most worrisome part is that it will further destabilize the ice shelf and the rate of it falling apart is only supposed to increase by this.

As such things go, the West Antarctic Peninsula calving is not particularly significant in terms of being or enabling large-scale changes in sea level. The shelf is a shelf, that is, it is already floating in the ocean, and its status as solid or liquid doesn't affect net sea levels. The peninsula itself is a long and thin landmass, which contains relatively little ice. Loss of the shelf does not, of itself, create the risk of greatly accellerated large scale icecap loss.

The symbolic and scientific significance are large. This is an exceedingly large ice mass, it may persist for years, possibly decades, in the Southern Ocean. It may pose a threat to shipping (though there's comparatively little through the region), and may have impacts on local biology and ecosystems (habitat loss, habitat gain, habitat change).

The mechanisms of loss, calving, migration, persistence, and of resulting changes to land-based glacial flow, will be fascinating.

But in terms of portending a drastic increase of ice flows local to it, the calving has little impact, as compared to, say, a shelf loss proximate to the primary Antarctic land mass -- the Ross or Weddel shelves, for example, which have behind them a thousand kilometers and more of kilometer-thick ice. That will be an interesting occurrence.

Or the formation and destruction, say, of ice dams, on the Antarctic continent or Greenland, creating meltwater pools, perhaps hundreds of kilometers in extent, and suddenly releasing those, as the dams erode, into the oceans. Similar mechanisms created a badlands landscape in eastern Washington State as the prehistoric Lake Missoula formed and drained, perhaps dozens of times, releasing cubic kilometers of water in massive scours. A similar mechanism, probably in Canada, triggered a catastrophic sea-level rise, measured as I recall in meters, over the course of days to a month.

That would also make for an interesting news cycle.

Contextualisation of these types of events in the press is exceedingly poor, with a small handsful of exceptions. I've already mentioned Brad Plumer's Vox coverage in this thread, he's among the exceptions.