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AT NASA IceBridge team of scientists on this massive iceberg fell off the Pine Island Glacier, the most recent calving event for the 68,000-square-mile glacier in Antarctica. Though they did not see the actual moment of breakage, this is one of the largest events of its kind in recent memory.
When a iceberg breaks away from a glacier – a process called calving – it is a sign that there is some type of structural issue with the ice sheet. This is probably the case with the Pine Island Glacier, which has been thinning for the greater part of 25 years.
In this most recent event, spotted on Wednesday by NASA scientists, a massive rift of 115 square miles appeared, which later led to a massive shedding of ice. This most recent event is the latest among a pattern of calving events at the Pine Island Glacier.
This new iceberg, called B-46, broke away from Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier at the end of October, though we did not really get any pictures of it until this week. When the rift first appeared, it was 115 square miles, which is about the size of Manhattan Island, but the largest individual is 87 square miles.
When an iceberg the size of lower Manhattan shed from Greenland's Helheim Glacier in July, the Washington Post reported that 10 trillion tons of ice fell into the ocean.
This week's iceberg calving event is still dwarfed by the iceberg A-68, which was more than 3,600 square miles when it broke off Antarctica in July 2017.
However, this week's event is still classified as another large calving event.
Size aside, there are other reasons to pause and reflect on the status of B-46. The Pine Island Glacier this year has been published in 2013, once in 2015, and one in 2017, which adds up to an alarming amount of ice flow. These icebergs do not simply stay put: They can float into more populated waters. For example, ice shed from the Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier in Greenland is rumored to be responsible for sinking the Titanic in 1918.
The next pressing concern is doing this. NASA tweeted on Thursday that the Pine Island Glacier is the fastest melting glacier in Antarctica.
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