Icebergs are notoriously unpredictable and no-one knows what exactly it will do next.
Known as A23a, the world's biggest and oldest iceberg calved from the Antarctic shelf in 1986.
It
remained stuck for over 30 years before finally breaking free in 2020,
its lumbering journey north sometimes delayed by ocean forces that kept
it spinning in place.
This monster block of freshwater was being
whisked along by the world's most powerful ocean "jet stream" -- the
Antarctic Circumpolar Current.
Paris (AFP) – An enormous chunk has broken off the world's largest iceberg, in a possible first sign the behemoth from Antarctica could be crumbling, scientists told AFP on Friday.
The colossal iceberg -- which is more than twice the size of Greater
London and weighs nearly one trillion tonnes -- had largely stayed
intact since it started slowly moving north in 2020.
It has been
drifting toward the remote island of South Georgia in the South
Atlantic, raising the prospect it could run aground in shallower water
and disrupt feeding for baby penguins and seals.
But a chunk about
19 kilometres (12 miles) long has cleaved off, said Andrew Meijers from
the British Antarctic Survey, who encountered the iceberg in late 2023
and has tracked its fate via satellite ever since.
- "This is definitely the first significant clear slice of the iceberg that's appeared," the physical oceanographer told AFP.
- Soledad Tiranti, a glaciologist currently on an Argentinian exploration voyage in the Antarctic, also told AFP that a section had "broken" away.
The jagged piece has an area of roughly 80 square kilometres (31 square miles) -- huge in its own right, but just a fraction of the approximately 3360 square kilometres that remained.
Meijers said
icebergs were full of deep fractures, and although this monumental
specimen had shrunk over time and lost a much smaller piece, it had
"held together pretty nicely".
- "This is a sign that those rifts in it are starting to break up," he said.
In the past, other mega-icebergs had fallen apart "relatively quickly over the course of several weeks" once they started losing big pieces, he said.
It was hard to say if this was "a loose tooth just waiting to come out" or evidence of a much bigger change underway. . .
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