The world’s largest iceberg, A23a, is moving into the open waters near Antarctica after being essentially stuck in place for decades. It’s seen here in satellite imagery from Nov. 15.
European Union/Copernicus Sentinel-3/via Reuters
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European Union/Copernicus Sentinel-3/via Reuters
The world’s largest iceberg, A23a, is moving into the open waters near Antarctica after being essentially stuck in place for decades. It’s seen here in satellite imagery from Nov. 15.
European Union/Copernicus Sentinel-3/via Reuters
Ships plying the frigid waters near the Antarctic Peninsula, south of South America, will need to keep an eye on their radar for a floating island of ice: “The largest iceberg in the world, A-23a, is on the move into open ocean!” as the British Antarctic Survey recently announced.
“It’s a trillion tons of ice. So it’s hard to comprehend just how big a patch of ice this is,” Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, told NPR.
Iceberg A23a measures 40 by 32 nautical miles, according to the U.S. National Ice Center. For comparison, Hawaii’s island of Oahu is 44 miles long and 30 miles across. And New York City’s Manhattan Island is about 13.4 miles long and spans around 2.3 miles at its widest point.
When A23a was still part of an ice shelf, it held a Soviet research station — and it whisked that base off to sea when it…
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