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. Open water throughout winter helps seals and penguins survive, and stimulates phytoplankton production.The world’s largest iceberg, dubbed A-76, has calved from Antarctica. The ocean still freezes, but the ice is constantly pushed away by the prevailing winds. Just like a wall they shield what is in their lee, and rather than the ocean being covered by drifting sea ice it can remain open throughout the year to form what is called a polynya. In a few special places glaciers can extend tens of kilometres into the ocean – giant fingers of ice several hundred metres thick, pointing out into the sea. On reaching the sea, these glaciers fracture and release icebergs or form large regions of floating ice known as ice shelves.
Snow falls on the continent and over time it has built up layers of ice which flow in glaciers towards the coast.
To a scientist it is a dynamic environment – it's just a question of the timescale you are looking at. It often indicates a user profile.Ī tabular iceberg gets stuck in thin, seasonal sea ice.Įveryone knows Antarctica is an ice-covered continent, but the ice is not static. ago I regularly post to r/collapse and I think your comment still deserves to be on top. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. Once it melts, the new iceberg will not lead to a sea level rise, because it was part of a floating ice shelf - just like a melting ice cube doesn't increase the level of the drink in your glass.
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