![]() ![]() Only time will tell what the full impact of the birth of the new iceberg will be. ![]() ![]() Collapse of the Larsen C ice shelf would remove buttressing from glaciers, meaning they could flow faster into the sea, eventually resulting in sea level rises. But, they note, the release of the iceberg might make the rest of the Larsen C ice shelf less stable. But in terms of its impact, the event is less dramatic: the iceberg itself won’t result in a sea level rise, and scientists say there is no evidence its formation is down to climate change. It is also exciting for the technological advances that have allowed scientists to regularly track the development of the rift, monitoring its growth down to 1km resolution. While that doesn’t make it the largest iceberg on record - that gong goes to an iceberg that broke away from the Ross ice shelf in 2000 - it is one of the biggest. This is a 5,800 sq km iceberg - that’s twice the size of Luxembourg, or roughly the area of Delaware. “We will have to wait years or decades to know what will happen to the remainder of Larsen C,” he said, pointing out that it took seven years after the release of a large iceberg from Larsen B before the ice shelf became unstable and disintegrated. Nevertheless previous research by the team has suggested that the remaining ice shelf is likely less stable now that the iceberg has calved, although it is unlikely the event would have any short-term effects. Luckman said that while the Larsen C ice shelf might continue to shed icebergs, it might regrow. “But despite keeping us waiting for so long, I’m pretty sure that Antarctica won’t be shedding a tear when it’s gone because the continent loses plenty of its ice this way each year, and so it’s really just business as usual!” “Everyone loves a good iceberg, and this one is a corker,” he said. “I am not unduly concerned about it – it is not the first mega iceberg ever to have formed,” he said.Īndrew Shepherd, professor of Earth Observation at the University of Leeds, agreed. “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,” said Hogg.įollowing the collapse of the more northerly Larsen A ice shelf in 1995 and Larsen B in 2002, all eyes have turned to Larsen C.īut Siegert is quick to point out that the calving of the new iceberg is not a sign that the ice shelf is about to disintegrate, stressing that ice shelves naturally break up as they extend further out into the ocean. “There is enough ice in Antarctica that if it all melted, or even just flowed into the ocean, sea levels rise by 60 metres,” said Martin Siegert, professor of geosciences at Imperial College London and co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change & Environment.īut while the birth of the huge iceberg might look dramatic, experts say it will not itself result in sea level rises. These ice shelves act like buttresses, holding back and slowing down the movement into the sea of the glaciers that feed them. Unlike thin layers of sea ice, ice shelves are floating masses of ice, hundreds of metres thick, which are attached to huge, grounded ice sheets. The Larsen-C rift opening over the last 2 years from #Sentinel1 /MT9d3HAw1M- Adrian Luckman January 31, 2017 It is likely that this will break into smaller pieces as time goes by,” said Adrian Luckman, professor of glaciology at Swansea University and leader of the UK’s Midas project which is focused on the state of the ice shelf. Between the 24 June and 27 June the movement of the ice sped up, reaching a rate of more than 10 metres per day for the already-severed section.īut in the end it wasn’t a simple break – data collected just days before the iceberg calved revealed that the rift had branched multiple times. The huge crack that spawned the new iceberg grew over a period of years, but between 25 May and 31 May alone, the rift grew by 17km – the largest increase since January. “It is a really major event in terms of the size of the ice tablet that we’ve got now drifting away,” said Anna Hogg, an expert in satellite observations of glaciers from the University of Leeds.Īt 5,800 sq km the new iceberg, expected to be dubbed A68, is half as big as the record-holding iceberg B-15 which split off from the Ross ice shelf in the year 2000, but it is nonetheless believed to be among the 10 largest icebergs ever recorded. ![]()
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