The planet’s most massive iceberg will soon be reaching the open ocean. A68, an enormous berg that spun off from the Antarctic back in July of 2017, has now gotten father in the north region of the planet.
When it ruptured from the Larsen C Ice Shelf, the massive iceberg had a size of about 2,300 square miles, and it has lost almost no piece of its mass throughout the last two and a half years. The berg is about the same extent as the state of Delaware or approximately four times the size of Greater London. Even so, reports state that A68 will encounter difficulties when attempting to maintain its current shape when it gets to the Southern Ocean’s more dynamic waters.
“With a thickness to length ratio akin to five sheets of A4, I am astonished that the ocean waves haven’t already made ice cubes out of A68,” said Adrian Luckman of Swansea University told BBC News. “If it survives for long as one piece when it moves beyond the edge of the sea-ice, I will be very surprised,” he stated.
The Most Massive Iceberg in the World is Approaching Open Ocean
These kinds of bergs have to be closely observed so that they don’t provoke issues for oceangoing ships as well.
“If it becomes a risk really depends on the route the iceberg follows, but I guess that also the smaller bergs will be tracked and their location will be communicated to ships,” Sef Lhermitte, professor of geoscience and remote sensing at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, stated.
Researchers believed that the massive iceberg would shatter in smaller pieces immediately after it first farrowed, but it mainly kept its form intact. “For an object weighing around 1 trillion tons, Iceberg A68 appears to be quite nimble,” Luckman, who published an animation of the iceberg’s mechanics, stated on his blog.
