The satellites of the European Space Agency have detected the detachment of the iceberg baptized as A-76 in Antarctica.
The finger-shaped chunk of ice, which is about 170 kilometers long and 25 kilometers wide, now floats freely in the Weddell Sea, a large bay in western Antarctica where explorer Ernest Shackleton once lost his ship. , the Endurance, precisely due to a block of ice.
This 4,320 square kilometer iceberg has become the largest in the world surpassing the A-23A iceberg which is about 3,380 square kilometers and also floats in the Weddell Sea.
A-76 was first detected by the British Antarctic Survey and confirmed by the US National Ice Center.It was first captured by the European Union’s Copernicus mission , a constellation of two satellites orbiting the poles of the Earth, which confirmed an earlier observation made by the aforementioned British Antarctic Survey, which was the first organization to notice the dramatic and gigantic rupture.
The Ronne Ice Shelf on the flank of the Antarctic Peninsula is one of the largest of the huge floating ice sheets that connect with the continent’s land mass and extend into the surrounding seas . Although it is part of the natural cycle for pieces to break off, we cannot ignore that some ice shelves along the Antarctic peninsula have undergone rapid disintegration in recent years, a phenomenon that scientists believe may be related to the change. climate.
“A76 and A74 are just part of the natural cycles on ice shelves that haven’t broken anything big for decades,” Laura Gerrish, a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey, wrote on Twitter. “It is important to monitor the frequency of all iceberg detachments, but we were expecting all of these, for now.”
Alex Brisbourne, a glacier geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey, also commented that the Weddell Sea was not currently warming, but in other parts of the Antarctic continent, “ocean warming was melting other ice shelves and this is allowing the ice drain faster off the continent, increasing the rate of sea level rise. “
The satellites will continue to track the new iceberg, as they did with the A-68A, which broke off in July 2017 and completely melted on April 20, 2021. It was one of the largest icebergs recorded by satellites.
How are icebergs named?
The names of the icebergs are derived from the Antarctic quadrant in which they were originally sighted, followed by a sequential number; Then, if a new iceberg breaks from an already named one, a sequential letter is added to it, according to the U.S. National Ice Center.Earlier this year, an iceberg measuring more than 788 square kilometers split from the shelf. Brunt ice pack from Antarctica in the Weddell Sea. The iceberg was also larger than New York City , for example to scale.
