![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() A74 has now drifted away from the Ice Shelf into the Weddell Sea. An Iceberg the Size of Delaware Just Broke Away From Antarctica A crack more than 120 miles long had developed over several years in a floating ice shelf called Larsen C, and scientists who have. By 2020, another crack appeared further north and an iceberg (now known as A74) separated from the ice shelf in February 2021. ![]() In October 2016, a new crack known as Halloween Crack was detected around 17 kilometres North of the Halley Research Station. All data are sent back to Cambridge for analysis, so we know what is happening even in the Antarctic winter – when there are no staff on the station, it is dark for 24 hours and the temperature falls below minus 50 degrees C,” said Jane Francis, director of BAS, in a press statement. During the last ice age, massive icebergs periodically broke off from an ice sheet covering a large swath of North America and discharged rapidly melting ice. These measure how the ice shelf is deforming and moving, and are compared to satellite images from ESA, NASA and the German satellite TerraSAR-X. Measurements of the ice shelf are carried out multiple times a day using an automated network of high-precision GPS instruments that surround the station. “Our glaciologists and operations teams have been anticipating this event. The UK’s national polar research institute took the precaution of relocating Halley Research Station in 2016 when Chasm-1 began widening.Īlso read | Rocket Lab expands launch footprint with first mission from US BAS has a research station located on the Brunt Ice Shelf called the Halley Research Station. The Brunt Ice Shelf has a complex glaciological structure, and the impact of calving events is unpredictable. Ice calving refers to the breaking off of ice chunks from the edge of an ice shelf or glacier. This is the second major “calving” incident in the area in the last two years, and it happened a decade after BAS scientists first detected the growth of vast cracks in the ice. The iceberg split from the ice shelf when a crack known as Chasm-1 fully extended through the shelf. The breakoff took place on January 23 between 12.30 AM and 1.30 AM IST. “We will have to wait years or decades to know what will happen to the remainder of Larsen C,” Luckman said.A gigantic iceberg measuring around 1,550 square kilometres, more than twice the size of the city of Mumbai, broke off from the 150 metres-thick Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica, according to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). Though this latest iceberg is about 10 times smaller than the 2015 event, measuring between 0.6 and 1.2 miles (1 to 2 km), NASA scientists said the recent break shows how fragile the ice shelf is. Scientists do not directly attribute the new glacier's calving to climate change, as such shifts in ice shelves are considered natural, but scientists agree climate change contributed to the disintegration of both Larsen A and Larsen B ice shelves, beginning in the 1990s. “It’s like your ice cube in your gin and tonic-it is already floating and if it melts it doesn’t change the volume of water in the glass by very much at all,” Anna Hogg, a glacier expert from the University of Leeds, told The Guardian. Sea levels will not immediately rise, according to Project MIDAS, as A68 was already floating, but further destabilization of the ice shelf could lead to its collapse, which would contribute to rising sea levels. "Some of the ice may remain in the area for decades, while parts of the iceberg. "It may remain in one piece but is more likely to break into fragments," Adrian Luckman, a professor at Swansea University and lead investigator of Project MIDAS, told Reuters. ![]()
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