NASA Photographs Rectangular Iceberg – BBC News



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Iceberg

Copyright of the image
NASA

Legend

The iceberg had recently calved Larsen C ice pack in Antarctica

NASA has published a striking photo of a rectangular iceberg floating in the Weddell Sea off the Antarctic.

The US space agency said the sharp angles and flat surface of the object suggested that it had recently detached from an ice floe.

The edges are still sharp and have not yet been worn by the waves of the ocean.

The photo was taken last week by scientists on a NASA search plane.

However, these objects are not unknown and even have a name: tabular icebergs.

These are flat and long and are formed by separating the edges of the ice tablets.

Kelly Brunt, a glaciologist from NASA and the University of Maryland, said the training process looked a bit like a fingernail that takes too much time and cracks in the end.

As a result, they often had a geometric shape, she said.

"What makes this one a little unusual is that it looks almost like a square," she added.

This iceberg comes from the crumbling pack ice of Larsen on the Antarctic Peninsula.

It's hard to say exactly how big the iceberg is in the photo, but the experts claimed that it was probably more than 1.6 km wide.

And, as with all icebergs, the visible area on the surface is only a small fraction of the mass of the object – in this case about 10%.

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