huge new iceberg in Antarctica

New satellite imagery shows a massive iceberg that broke off the Brant Ice Shelf in Antarctica on Sunday night.

The thickness of the frozen block is 150 meters, and the area is 1550 square meters. km.

It ended in a huge fissure that split the ice shelf in half, known as Chasm 1, which has grown by about 4 kilometers every year since 2012.

The incredible images were taken by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite, which orbits the poles as part of a mission managed by the European Space Agency.

GPS sensors began picking up movement in Abyss 1 between 7 and 8 pm on Sunday.

At the time, 21 employees of the British Antarctic Survey were working at the Halley Research Station, just 19 km away.

Fortunately, they were all in complete safety, as they had been preparing for this turn of events for some time. In 2016, the continuous growth of Chasm 1 prompted the National Institute of Polar Research to move its site 23 kilometers inland.

The Halley VI research station consists of eight blocks, each of which is ski-mounted so that they can be easily hauled away from the edge of the ice shelf if needed.

Staff are there from November to March to maintain facilities that allow them to remotely monitor experiments during the winter.

Those currently on site will be flown home on February 6.

Satellite images of the new iceberg were processed by Ben Wallis, a PhD student at the University of Leeds, who also shared them on social media.

A colony of thousands of emperor penguins is known to inhabit the tongue of the Dawson-Lambton Glacier, which lies immediately west of the Brant Ice Shelf.

Some of the penguins started life in the Halley Bay Colony, which was largely wiped out in 2016 when part of the ice shelf collapsed.

It has already been confirmed that the sea ice they call home is still intact.

The separation of glaciers is a completely natural process that occurs regularly on a frozen continent and is not related to climate change.

Professor Dominic Hodgson, BAS glaciologist, said: “This event was expected and is part of the natural behavior of the Brunt Ice Shelf. Our scientific and operational teams continue to monitor the ice shelf in real time to ensure its safety and to support the scientific research we are doing in Halle.”

The separation of the glacier is due to the fact that it is moving – its end is unstable and part of it simply falls off, often forming an iceberg. This process allows glaciers to balance the accumulation of new snow and ice.

While not the largest iceberg to have broken off in Antarctica, it is the largest piece of the Brunt Ice Shelf to have been lost since observations began over 100 years ago, in 1915.

Abyss 1 was inactive for at least 35 years, until 2012.

In 2015 and 2016, scientists used ice-penetrating radar technology and satellite imagery to determine the path a crack might take and the rate at which it might grow.

The resulting iceberg is predicted to drift into the Weddell Sea, but glaciologists will track its movement. It will be named the US National Ice Center, but will most likely have an “A” on it, indicating that it is in the Antarctic quadrant from longitude 0°E to longitude 90°W.

Since the last major iceberg to separate from this quadrant was called “A80”, this one may be called “A81”.

The loss of part of the ice shelf could accelerate the movement of the remaining ice, which could put pressure on other shelf features.

One of the most notable of these is the “Halloween Crack”, which appeared in October 2016 and extends for 60 km just a few kilometers from Chasm-1.

Another important feature is the so-called McDonald ice folds, the rise of ice as a result of an obstacle protruding from the seabed.

This usually helps to lock the Brunt Ice Shelf in place, but this can be affected by changes in the speed of ice movement.

In November 2020, a major rift called the Northern Rift began to cut its way through the ice and continued to widen into the new year.

The Brant Ice Shelf consists of ice sheet that originally fell as snow in Antarctica and flowed from land to sea.

There was concern that if it hit West Brunt harder, it would eventually cause the block to break away from the main ice shelf and form a new iceberg.

Christina DENISYUK.

A source: dailymail.co.uk

Photo: Copernicus/Sentinel-2/ESA/Ben Wallis