Credit: NASA/John Sonntag
Eos has an article about the Delaware-sized slab of ice that just broke off of Antarctica. It weighs about 1 trillion metric tons. By the way, that's a 1 followed by 12 0's... 1,000,000,000,000. The 5800 square kilometer chunk is drifting free in the Weddell Sea.
But now a 5800-square-kilometer section is free, drifting in the Weddell Sea. “We have been anticipating this event for months, and have been surprised how long it took for the rift to break through the final few kilometers of ice,” wrote Adrian Luckman, a glaciologist at Swansea University in the United Kingdom, on a research blog. Luckman is the lead investigator of Project MIDAS (Impact of Melt on Ice Shelf Dynamics and Stability), a U.K.-based Antarctic research project that has been watching the widening crack in Larsen C. “We will continue to monitor both the impact of this calving event on the Larsen C Ice Shelf, and the fate of this huge iceberg.”
