World’s Largest Iceberg Breaks Off of Antarctica
The finger-shaped chunk of ice, which is roughly 105 miles (170 kilometers) long and 15 miles (25 kilometers) wide, was spotted by satellites as it calved from the western side of Antarctica's Ronne Ice Shelf, according to the European Space Agency. The berg is now floating freely on the Weddell Sea, a large bay in the western Antarctic where explorer Ernest Shackleton once lost his ship, the Endurance, to pack ice.
The 1,667-square-mile (4,320 square kilometers) iceberg—which now the world’s biggest and has been called A-76, after the Antarctic quadrant where it was first spotted—was captured by the European Union's Copernicus Sentinel, a two-satellite constellation that orbits Earth's poles. The satellites confirmed an earlier observation made by the British Antarctic Survey, which was the first organization to notice the breakaway.
Because the ice shelf that this berg calved from was already floating on water, the event won't directly impact sea levels. However, ice shelves help to slow the flow of glaciers and ice streams into the sea; so indirectly, the loss of parts of an ice shelf eventually contributes to rising seas, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The NSIDC also says that the continent of Antarctica, which is warming at a faster pace than the rest of the planet, holds enough frozen water to raise global sea levels by 200 feet (60 meters). Scientists don't think that human-induced climate change caused the calving of A-76 or its nearby predecessor, A-74.
