In our time of fakes and "photoshop" you don't need to believe everything at once. We need to figure it out and find out - can this actually happen?
So, here we see such a surprisingly flat iceberg along the edges. There are suspicions …
Chunks of ice that break off glaciers and set sail become icebergs. Their shape depends on the origin: for example, the upper part of icebergs of ice sheets is never even: it is inclined like a pitched roof. Icebergs of outlet glaciers have a convex upper surface dissected by cracks. And icebergs on ice shelves are characterized by a flat horizontal surface with vertical side walls. But even among all the variety of icebergs, you can find those that claim to be ideal.
These days NASA is conducting Operation IceBridge: surveying the Earth's ice sheet in order to study the dynamics of its melting. Not far from the Larsen C ice shelf off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, a perfectly flat rectangular iceberg hit the lens: as if it had been cut out of the ice mass along a ruler.
However, there was no human intervention, NASA experts assure. To explain how such an iceberg forms, University of Maryland glaciologist Kelly Brant gives an example: a nail that grows for too long eventually begins to crack, and the fracture is characterized by straight lines. Similar processes on ice shelves give rise to table-like icebergs - wide and long blocks of ice with a flat surface. According to Brant, this iceberg is very young: its sharp corners have not yet been smoothed out by wind and waves. It is unstable, and new cracks can form on it at any time.
But last year a giant iceberg A-68 broke away, the area of which is estimated at 5800 km². It broke away from the Larsen S Antarctic Ice Shelf after several years of observing a crack that accelerated significantly last spring. The breakaway iceberg is one of the largest on record. The area of the glacier, from which it broke off, then decreased by 12%.
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