Satellite images from ESA probes show that the Larsen Glacier, the most vulnerable part of the Antarctic ice sheet, has almost completely broken away from the mainland and in the coming weeks it will turn into a giant iceberg with an area of Estonia, according to the website of the space agency.
“The crack has only five kilometers to overcome in order to reach the waters of the ocean. Using imagery and data from CryoSat, we calculated the thickness of the ice and came to the conclusion that the top of the iceberg will be 190 meters high, and it will contain approximately 1155 cubic kilometers of ice. There will be another 210 meters of ice under the water,”said Noel Gourmelen from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Climatologists, oceanologists 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 view 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 continuously monitors the state of the southern ice in the framework of the IceBridge project, studying them using reconnaissance aircraft, and ESA monitors their condition using 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 this glacier, as shown by IceBridge data, should have begun their journey into oblivion. last summer.
This is exactly what 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 about 500 deep has appeared in the Larsen C Glacier, the last part of the Larsen ice massif. meters.
This crack continued to grow rapidly this year, reaching 200 kilometers in length by July 2017. Now the Larsen C glacier "holds" to the Antarctic ice massif with a narrow strip of ice only five kilometers thick. When the crack reaches the waters of the world's oceans, the glacier will turn into a giant iceberg, whose area will be about 6,500 square kilometers, which is comparable to the area of Estonia or the Moscow region.
Promotional video:
In a few weeks or months, when this giant iceberg appears, it will automatically become the largest structure of its kind, the birth of which has been documented by mankind.
It is not yet clear whether the former Larsen C glacier will "travel" across the Earth's oceans as a single piece of ice, or whether it will split into many other icebergs of more modest sizes. In any case, scientists plan to monitor its fate in the coming months and years, as an iceberg of this size and its debris could pose a threat to ships passing through the Drake Passage or through the waters of the southern seas off the coast of Africa and Australia.