A large block of ice has broken off the northern tip of the A-68A iceberg as seen in new images captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission.
Satellite missions have been used to track the A-68A berg on its journey since 2017, when it broke off the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica. Over the past weeks, the A-68A iceberg has drifted alarmingly close to the remote island of South Georgia, where scientists feared that the iceberg could ground in the shallow waters offshore and threaten wildlife.
New satellite images revealed yesterday that the iceberg has spun around in a clockwise direction, moving one end of the berg closer to the shelf and into shallow waters. In doing so, the berg could have scraped the seafloor, measuring less than 200 m deep, causing an enormous block of ice to snap off the iceberg’s northern tip.
The new chunk of ice is around 18 km long and approximately 140 sq km, around the same size as Seville, Spain, and can be seen detached from the main A-68A iceberg in the images. Despite its small appearance in the images, the new piece of ice is so large it will most likely be named A-68D by the US National Ice Centre in the coming days. Two other chunks of ice that previously broke off were named A-68B and A-68C.
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Image via European Space Agency
