The world’s largest iceberg departs from Antarctica

The world’s largest iceberg departs from Antarctica

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The European Space Agency said on Wednesday that a huge block of ice has cut into the Weddell Sea from the frozen edge of Antarctica, making it the largest iceberg in the world.

NASA stated in a statement on its website that the new iceberg, which has just been called A-76 by scientists, was found in the latest satellite image captured by the Copernicus Outpost 1 mission and contains a huge rectangular ice cap. photo.

Its surface area spans 4,320 square kilometers (1,668 square miles), is 175 kilometers (106 miles) long, and 25 kilometers (15 miles) wide. This makes it three-quarters the area of ??PEI, which has an area of ??5660 square kilometers, which is larger than Spain’s Mediterranean tourist island Mallorca, which covers an area of ??3640 square kilometers (1405 square miles). The land area of ??Rhode Island in the United States is still small, only 2,678 square kilometers (1,034 square miles).

The huge force of A-76 broke away from the Ronne ice shelf in Antarctica. It is the largest iceberg on earth, surpassing the current second-place A-23A, with a size of approximately 3,380 square kilometers (1,305 square miles). , And floating in the Weddell Sea.

Scientists said earlier this year that another Antarctic iceberg threatened a small island of penguin population at the southern tip of South America. Since then, it has lost most of its mass and shattered into pieces.

A-76 was first detected by the British Antarctic Survey and confirmed by the National Ice Center in Maryland using images from Copernicus Outpost 1, which consisted of two polar orbiting satellites.

The Ron Ice Shelf near the bottom of the Antarctic Peninsula is one of the largest pieces of ice among several huge ice floes that connect to the land of the African continent and extend into the surrounding sea.

Has nothing to do with climate change

Research glaciologist Ted Scambos said that regular mass calving of these shelves is part of the natural cycle, and the A-76 fracture is likely to split into two or three quickly, which is related to the climate. The change is irrelevant. At the University of Colorado Boulder.

Scombus said that in the past century or even longer, the Rhone River and another huge ice shelf, Ross, “have manifested in a stable, quasi-cyclical manner.” He told Reuters via email that because the ice was already floating in the sea and then slipped off the coast, its detachment would not raise the sea level.

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center of the United States, in recent years, some ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula have rapidly collapsed. Scientists believe that this phenomenon may be related to global warming.



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