This animated image shows the retreat of an iceberg at the Pine Island Glacier in images taken roughly a month apart, on Sept. 28 and Oct. 23, 2017.

(NASA)

At a Glance

In just a month's time, a West Antarctic iceberg broke free from a glacier and then crumbled.The event was captured by NASA satellites that took pictures.

It didn't take long for a gigantic 100-square-mile iceberg to collapse into pieces after it became separated from a key glacier in West Antarctica just weeks ago.

Known as B-44, the iceberg separated from the retreating Pine Island Glacier in late September, shedding a chunk of ice four times the size of Manhattan , the Verge reported. The glacier is losing ice at a rate that has accelerated in recent years and is one of Antarctica's biggest contributors to rising sea levels, the report added.

"This is a result ," Eric Rignot, a climate scientist at the University of California, Irvine, told the New York Times. "In some relatively colder years, we know the melt rate slowed down and the glaciers slowed down. On warm ocean years, the glacier moves really fast."

Captured by the Operational Land Imager on the Landsat 8 satellite, NASA provided the two pictures in the animated image above after , according to NASA's Earth Observatory. In the first image, the huge iceberg had already begun to crack and separate; in the second image, taken less than a month later, the iceberg had moved considerably and was crumbling.

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B-44 was attached to a floating section of the Pine Island Glacier, so this calving event will not raise sea levels. However, as the glacier continues its expected retreat, there could be serious consequences – a complete melt , according to the Washington Post.

"It’s the fifth large calving event since 2000," Stef Lhermitte, a satellite observation specialist at theDelft University of Technology in the Netherlands, told the Washington Post. "This one and 2015, they were much further inland than the previous ones. So there has been a retreat of the calving front, specifically between 2011 and 2015."

Another reason for concern: This calving event occurred in the center of the ice sheet, rather than on the sides, which suggests the rifts were formed by warm water beneath the glacier. If the warmer water is eating away at the ice from both the sides and below, this could accelerate the melting, the report added.

According to a study published last week in Environmental Research Letters, a rise of at least 1.9 degrees Celsius in global temperatures , as well as the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The study also said it's likely that global sea levels will rise by at least 4 feet by the end of the century, and some of that meltwater will come from the Pine Island glacier.