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Look at this iceberg. It's beautiful. Perfectly rectangular. An object of almost geometric perfection that advances in a polar sea from the usual chaotic random chance of the natural world. This is reminiscent of the monolith of "2001: an odyssey of space".
But, unlike the monolith of this very strange movie, this iceberg has not been deposited on this world by extraterrestrials. As Kelly Brunt, an ice scientist at NASA and the University of Maryland, explained, this was probably a fairly common process along the icebergs.
"So here's the market," Brunt told Live Science. "We have two types of icebergs: we have the type that everyone can imagine who sank the Titanic, and they look like prisms or triangles on the surface and you know that they have a sub -So crazy.And then you have what is called "tabular icebergs." [In Photos: Huge Icebergs Break Off Antarctica]
Tabular icebergs are broad and flat, and long, like pies, said Brunt. They separated from the ice banks – large blocks of ice, connected to the ground but floating in the water surrounding icy places like Antarctica. This came from the dilapidated pack ice of Larsen C on the Antarctic Peninsula.
D & # 39; yesterday #IceBridge flight: a tabular iceberg sits to the right, floating among the sea ice just off the Larsen ice floe C. The acute angles and the flat surface of the iceberg indicate that it was probably recently calved from the ice. pic.twitter.com/XhgTrf642Z
– ICE NASA (@NASA_ICE) October 17, 2018
Tabular icebergs are formed, she said, through a process that looks a bit like a fingernail that gets too long and creaks in the end. As a result, they are often rectangular and geometric, she added.
"What makes this one a little unusual is that it looks almost like a square," said Brunt.
It's hard to tell the size of the iceberg on this photo, she says, but it's probably more than one kilometer wide. And, like all icebergs, the visible part above the surface only represents the top 10% of its mass. The rest, said Brunt, is hidden under the water.
In the case of tabular icebergs, she said, this subsurface mass is usually regular and geometric, as can be seen above. This iceberg looks rather cool, she said. Its sharp angles indicate that the wind and the waves did not have a lot of time to break it down.
But despite the large mass of lamb, said Brunt, she would not advise to take a walk on her surface.
"It probably would not work," she said.
The thing is still much wider than deep, after all. But it is small enough to be unstable and crack at any time.
So, it is probably best to marvel at the thing from a distance.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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