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The Antarctic has really dropped his hair lately. First, there was news of a haunted purr from one of its pack ice. Then came the bizarre rectangular iceberg.
This is enough to make you believe that extraterrestrials live on the seventh continent. But no, it's just our planet of the show doing its job. And people certainly seem to have enjoyed the latest show, including the scientist who captured the viral images of the ice cake-shaped piece of ice cream.
"Everybody, from cousins to parents to a friend in Europe, has [messaged that they’ve] saw, "Jeremy Harbeck, the NASA scientist who broke the pictures, told Earther.
Harbeck is an experienced scientist with NASA's Operation IceBridge, a mission that uses aircraft loaded with instruments to document the state of ice at both poles. He told Earther that he had flown 62 IceBridge flights – most of them over the Arctic pack ice – so "I like to think I've seen a lot."
But the tabular iceberg was a first for him, especially since most of his work is done in the Arctic. You will find plenty of sea ice but few precious icebergs, which tend to detach from floating glaciers and ice trays whose supply is more limited in the High Arctic than in Antarctica.
The fateful day of last week he captured the tabular iceberg, he found himself staring out of the DC-8 window that NASA flies over Antarctica after a morning staring at the interior valleys of the Antarctic Peninsula. The plane had turned a corner to meet the Larsen C sea-ice and Harbeck was hoping to catch a glimpse of the Delaware-sized "berg" that crashed last July.
Harbeck said the plateau is also known for its bending that draws icebergs with sharp angles and faces, but the one he captured is a particularly striking example. Even though he did not know he was destined for viral fame, he knew it was worth taking some pictures.
"[It] It was not a big one, not a small one, but the fact that it had a square end caught my attention, "he said. "It was pretty photogenic."
The images represent the public as part of a much larger mission to understand what is happening on the overheated ice of the planet. Harbeck operates an on-board camera that calibrates a very sensitive laser mapping equipment called lidar, capable of accurately measuring changes in ice elevation. These data are, in turn, used to establish the truth and to control the quality of the data coming from NASA's recently launched ICESat-2 satellite.
The satellite offers a 310-kilometer view of ice at both poles and will help monitor the surface and thickness of the ice. Measurements are essential to improve climate models and to understand how fast seas could rise as climate change melts ice on the earth. This is a big problem, and scientists are making so much noise from Harbeck's work and satellites that the internet is talking about freakberg.
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