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The warming has scientists concerned about ice melt. Even at the South Pole, considered one of the planet’s coldest spots, temperatures have risen at three times the rate of the global average over the last three decades, data show. And the continent is influenced by other variables, including weather patterns in the tropics and strong winds.Īntarctica, however, is currently one of the fastest-warming places on Earth. The monitoring and tracking of polar icebergs began only in recent decades with the deployment of satellites. Scientists have limited understanding of how the ice behaved historically. Whether climate change was directly, or partially, responsible for destabilizing Larsen C is a matter of debate.
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“The Larsen C that was left afterwards was smaller by quite a bit.”Ī view of the A68a iceberg from a Royal Air Force reconnaissance plane near South George Island, Nov. “We had never seen a berg calve off as far inward as this iceberg,” said Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The biggest, B-15, measured 11,000 square kilometers when it broke from Antarctica’s Ross ice shelf in March 2000.īut A68a surprised scientists for other reasons, too. While icebergs are known to erratically break from glaciers and ice shelves every few years or so, there have been only five larger than A68a in the last 34 years. The saga of A68a has the scientific community debating if its calving was a consequence of climate change, and whether more such monster bergs are to come.
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The iceberg is larger than 66 countries or territories, including Singapore, Luxembourg and Brunei. “There’s nothing that’s really been that large before in scientific history that we’ve seen coming up to South Georgia,” Tarling said. The melting freshwater could also make the waters inhospitable for phytoplankton and other sea creatures that are crucial parts of the food chain. That could block some of the island’s 2 million penguins – including King penguins, Gentoos, Macaronis and Chinstraps – from reaching the waters to feed their young. If the berg lodges at the island’s flank, it could remain a fixture for up to 10 years before the ice melts or breaks away, Tarling said. Scientists expect the iceberg to grind over the seabed, crushing the island’s underwater life. Timelapse of images captured by NASA’s SUOMI satellite. “It is really, really close, less than 50 kilometers away,” making a collision almost inevitable, Tarling told Reuters this week. It’s now headed straight for South Georgia Island, a British overseas territory in the southern Atlantic, where within days it could smash into the remote world teeming with wildlife. “Normally we’d expect these icebergs to break apart in the open ocean with all the wave action and turbulence,” said Geraint Tarling, a biological oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey.īut not A68a. As the face of the Larsen C ice shelf has disintegrated in recent years, other bergs have traced a similar route as A68a. Still, the path it has taken is not uncommon. A68a broke off as a 5,800-square-kilometer mass behind that gyre, however, on the eastern side of the Antarctic peninsula. More than 90% of all icebergs calved from Antarctica end up traveling a near-coastal current, which moves clockwise around Antarctica before hitting the Weddell Gyre and slingshotting around to the Antarctic Circumpolar Current moving in the opposite direction. The current propelled the berg on a fast track through what scientists call “iceberg alley,” a northeast route traveled by chunks of ice that break from the peninsula. The mass broke from the Antarctic peninsula’s Larsen C ice shelf in July 2017 and headed slowly for the open ocean, sliding through the water for over two years until it hit the powerful Antarctic Circumpolar Current circling the southernmost continent.Īnd then, like a speed skater, it was on its way. Iceberg A68a has been on a slow journey toward cataclysm.