NASA satellites have captured the first detailed images of the giant iceberg that emerged in July this year after the Larsen Glacier split, and recorded the first signs that it began to disintegrate, NASA Earth Observatory said.
“In July, the polar night reigned over the entire Antarctic, so scientists had to study this iceberg using only radar and infrared images. The first photographs were received only in mid-September this year. As shown by several weeks of observations, the A-68 iceberg initially "staggered" in place, moving back and forth, which is why it split into two halves, "- NASA reports.
Climatologists, oceanographers and other scientists have long believed that climate change threatens to destroy mainly the northern ice reserves on Earth - the Greenland glaciers and the northern polar ice cap.
In recent years, this idea has begun to change, as scientists have found evidence that the first to disappear, not the northern ice, but part of the glaciers of Antarctica, leading to a catastrophic rise in sea levels.
For this reason, NASA, within the framework of the IceBridge project, continuously monitors the state of the southern ice from reconnaissance aircraft, and ESA monitors the situation with them from the Sentinel-1 and CryoSat-2 satellites.
These studies show that the most vulnerable and practically guaranteed "candidate" for destruction is the so-called Larsen Glacier on the east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. It began to disintegrate back in 1995, and the last fragments of the glacier, as shown by the IceBridge data, were to begin their journey into oblivion this summer.
And so it happened - the latest aerial images taken by NASA in early December last year show that a giant crack 112 kilometers long, about 100 meters wide and almost 500 deep has appeared in the Larsen C Glacier, the last part of the Larsen ice massif. meters.
It all started with a huge crack
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This crack continued its rapid growth in 2017, reaching 200 kilometers in length by July, leading to the formation of a giant iceberg, whose area is about 6,500 square kilometers, which is comparable to the size of Estonia or the Moscow region.
So far, this iceberg is located off the coast of Antarctica, at a distance of about 20 kilometers from them. The ice "island" has accelerated its movement in recent weeks after it split into two parts - a relatively small iceberg A-68B and a larger fragment A-68A, whose area is almost 100 times larger than that of its smaller brother.
As scientists expect, soon the wind and currents will begin to carry this mega-iceberg from the shores of the southern continent and cause it to split into even more fragments. The A-68 itself and its potential fragments, as scientists now believe, can pose a great danger to ships in the southern hemisphere of the Earth.