How NASA Found That Freaky Viral Iceberg

The now-viral tabular iceberg.Photo: Jeremy Harbeck / NASAAntarctica has been really letting its hair down lately. First, there was some haunting of one of its ice shelves. Then came the weirdo rectangular iceberg.It's enough to make you think aliens inhabit the Seventh Continent. No goal, it's just our freak show planet doing its thing. And people sure to have the latest show, including the scientist who captured the viral images of the cake-shaped sheet floating hunk of ice. "Everyone from cousin-in-laws to parents to a friend in Europe has [messaged that they’ve] seen it, "Jeremy Harbeck, the NASA scientist who snapped the images, told Earther.Harbeck is a senior scientist with NASA's IceBridge Operation, a mission that flies instrument-laden planes to document the state of the ice at both poles. He's been on IceBridge flights-most of them over the Arctic's sea ice-so "I like to think I've seen a lot." But the tabular iceberg was a first for him in the Arctic. There, you'll find lots of sea ice but few icebergs, which tend to break off floating glaciers and ice shelves that are in shorter supply in the Arctic than they are in Antarctica.On the fateful day tabular iceberg, he found himself looking at the window of the DC-8 that NASA flies over the Antarctic after a morning in the valleys of the Antarctic peninsula. The ice shelf meets the sea, and Harbeck was hoping to catch a glimpse of the Delaware-sized berg that fractured off shelf last July. Harbeck said the shelf is also known for flexing in a way that calves icebergs with sharp angles and faces. Even if he did not know it was destined for viral fame, he knew it was worth snapping a few pictures. "[It] "he said," but it was a fact that he had a square end caught my eye. "It was pretty photogenic." The pictures are the public facing part of a much bigger mission to understand what's happening to the planet's overheating ice. Harbeck operates on a camera which is highly calibrated. That data is, in turn, being used to ground-truth and monitoring data from NASA's recently-launched ICESat-2 satellite .The satellite provides a 310-mile high-speed the area and thickness of ice. The measurements are crucial for improving the climate and understanding of climate change. It's a big deal, and scientists are looking at Harbeck's work and the satellite has the internet has been about the freakberg.
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