New satellite images show massive Antarctica iceberg slowly drifting out to sea
Doyle Rice
The sea cruise is underway.
The massive iceberg that calved off Antarctica last week is slowly drifting into the Weddell Sea.
Satellite images show the widening gap between the 1-trillion-ton berg — known as A-68 — and the Larsen C ice shelf.
At 2,200 square miles, the chunk of floating ice is one of the largest ever recorded. It's nearly the size of Delaware.
Due to long winter nights and extensive cloud cover in Antarctica, photos of the iceberg are difficult to obtain.
Scientists studying the iceberg rely on satellites equipped with radar-imaging systems or infrared sensors, which can create images regardless of cloud cover or darkness.
The image on the top of this page came from the Deimos-1 satellite.
Massive iceberg nearly the size of Delaware breaks off Antarctica
Actual photos from research aircraft won't be possible until later this year, during the Antarctic spring and summer, according to Adrian Luckman, a professor of Swansea University and the lead investigator of the research group Project MIDAS.
The U.S. National Ice Center will monitor the path of the new iceberg, which will be determined by ocean currents around Antarctica, NASA said.
The new berg is likely to follow a similar path to the icebergs produced by the collapse of Larsen B: North along the coast of the Peninsula, then northeast into the South Atlantic Ocean, perhaps near the South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, a British territory.
“It’s very unlikely it will cause any trouble for navigation,” said Kelly Brunt, a glaciologist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
It will likely fracture into smaller bergs as it makes its way out to sea, the ice center said in a statement.
As for its inelegant moniker of A-68, iceberg names are derived from the Antarctic quadrant in which they were originally sighted, the ice center said. Thus, this is the 68th iceberg the ice center has tracked in the A quadrant, which includes Weddell Sea bergs.
