![]() Over the following weeks and months, the iceberg could be entrained in the swift south-westerly flowing coastal current, run aground or cause further damage by bumping into the southern Brunt Ice Shelf. ESA’s Mark Drinkwater said in a statement:Īlthough the calving of the new berg was expected and forecasted some weeks ago, watching such remote events unfold is still captivating. Glaciologists have been closely monitoring the many cracks and chasms in the Brunt Ice Shelf for the past two years, after rifts opened rapidly across the ice and raised concerns about the shelf’s stability. On March 1, clouds were sparse enough for the cameras on NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite to acquire this natural-color image of the new iceberg. The break was first detected by GPS equipment on February 26, 2021, and then confirmed the next day with radar images from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1A satellite. For example, iceberg A-68 was almost five times bigger when it calved from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in 2017. That’s a large iceberg, but Antarctica is known for churning out some enormous bergs. The new berg – informally dubbed ‘A-74’ – spans about 490 square miles (1,270 square km). Image via ESA.Ī giant iceberg, about twice the size of Chicago, broke off from the northern section of Antarctica’s Brunt Ice Shelf last Friday (February 26, 2021). National Snow & Ice Data Center.Satellite images show the iceberg breaking free and moving away rapidly from the floating ice shelf. ![]() Some ice shelves along the Antarctic peninsula, farther from the South Pole, have undergone rapid disintegration in recent years, a phenomenon scientists believe may be related to global warming, according to the U.S. Because the ice was already floating in the sea before dislodging from the coast, its breakaway does not raise ocean levels, he told Reuters by email. Scambos said the Ronne and another vast ice shelf, the Ross, have "behaved in a stable, quasi-periodic fashion" over the past century or more. ![]() Periodic calving of large chunks of those shelves is part of a natural cycle, and the breaking off of A-76, which is likely to split into two or three pieces soon, is not linked to climate change, said Ted Scambos, a research glaciologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The Ronne Ice Shelf near the base of the Antarctic Peninsula is one of the largest of several enormous floating sheets of ice that connect to the continent's landmass and extend out into surrounding seas. National Ice Center using imagery from Copernicus Sentinel-1, consisting of two polar-orbiting satellites. (CBC News)Ī-76 was first detected by the British Antarctic Survey and confirmed by the Maryland-based U.S. The iceberg is about three-quarters the size of Prince Edward Island. The enormity of A-76, which broke away from Antarctica's Ronne Ice Shelf, ranks as the largest existing iceberg on the planet, surpassing the now second-place A-23A, about 3,380 square kilometres (1,305 square miles) in size and also floating in the Weddell Sea.Īnother massive Antarctic iceberg that had threatened a penguin-populated island off the southern tip of South America has since lost much of its mass and broken into pieces, scientists said earlier this year. state of Rhode Island is smaller still, with a land mass of just 2,678 square kilometres (1,034 square miles). That makes it three-quarters the size of P.E.I., which has an area of 5,660 square kilometres, and larger than Spain's tourist island of Majorca in the Mediterranean, which occupies 3,640 square kilometres (1,405 square miles). Its surface area spans 4,320 square kilometres (1,668 square miles) and measures 175 kilometres (106 miles) long by 25 kilometres (15 miles) wide. ![]() The newly calved berg, designated A-76 by scientists, was spotted in recent satellite images captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, the space agency said in a statement posted on its website with a photo of the enormous, oblong ice sheet. (Copernicus Sentinel data (2021)/ESA, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)Ī giant slab of ice has sheared off from the frozen edge of Antarctica into the Weddell Sea, becoming the largest iceberg afloat in the world, the European Space Agency said on Wednesday. This animation uses images from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission and shows the giant slab of ice breaking off from the Ronne Ice Shelf, lying in the Weddell Sea, on. The world’s largest iceberg, dubbed A-76, has calved from Antarctica.
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