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Earlier this month, NASA spotted an unusually shaped iceberg on an Antarctic ice shelf. The perfectly square iceberg would have been separated from the Larsen C ice floe that had also produced the iceberg A-68 last year. ( NASA | Twitter )
A huge slab of iceberg that has recently separated from the Larsen C ice floe in Antarctica is so geometrically perfect that it seems almost unreal.
Iceberg square
NASA shared the picture of the iceberg that has since become viral. On Twitter, he has collected over 3,000 retweets, 6,000 likes, and hundreds of responses. He captured the imagination of many, some thinking it was made by extraterrestrials.
However, there is no giant plot around the perfectly rectangular ice sheet. It is a natural phenomenon called a tabular ice which, unlike the iceberg that sank the Titanic in 1912, has flat tops and steep sides.
Sometimes these tabular icebergs are gigantic in size, hundreds of kilometers long, and hundreds of feet high.
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
NASA spotted October 16 during one of its IceBridge flights, a program that tracks the global climate system. On the basis of its smooth edges, the agency believes that it was not long ago that the iceberg separated from Larsen C in Antarctica.
"What makes it a bit unusual, is that it looks almost like a square," said Kelly Brunt, NASA's ice scientist.
On the single photo it is impossible to determine the size of the iceberg, but Brunt felt that the tabular iceberg was about a mile wide. Only about 10% are visible above the water.
Fragmentation of Antarctic ice shelves
Larsen C, an ice platform, also produced the iceberg A-68 in 2017. In September, after being found stuck for more than a year, the iceberg's Returned, suggesting that he was ready to move.
Finally, the movement to the west end of the iceberg A-68? The satellite image @NASANPP yesterday shows that A-68 is no longer contiguous to the Larsen C ice platform, suggesting that it might not no longer be stuck on the ground near the Bawden Glacial Uplift; the eastern end continues to drift counterclockwise in the Weddell Sea pic.twitter.com/ulTB2QYYHy – The Antarctic Report (@AntarcticReport) September 2, 2018
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