![]() Earlier this year, NASA's Earth Observatory noted a third crack had occurred and appeared poised to result in calving, which is when ice chunks break off from a glacier. In 2016, the " Halloween crack," named for the day it was first spotted, appeared on radar images. Scientists first noticed in 2011 that previously stable chasms, or cracks that go all the way through the 500-foot thick mass, were expanding, opening the door for complete breaks. Three major cracks have developed in the giant floating sheet of ice over the course of the last decade. The split, which BAS confirmed on Friday, has been a long time coming. That is basically what happened last week in Antarctica when, according to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), a massive iceberg measuring in at more than 490 square miles broke off from the Brunt Ice Shelf. National Snow & Ice Data Center.Imagine the entire city of Los Angeles breaking off from the state of California and drifting off to sea. 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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