Antarctica's rapidly melting Pine Island Glacier has shed an iceberg the size of Manhattan, the latest evidence of the ice shelf’s fragility.

Nasa released photographs showing the block of ice separating from the southwest coast of the continent taken between January 26 and January 31.

The sequence, taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on Nasa’s Terra satellite, shows the berg when it first broke and then as it drifts in the bay.