NASA publishes more photos of a rectangular iceberg freak

New photos of a surprisingly rectangular iceberg provide a complete picture of this now famous Antarctic structure, which remains as strange as possible.

NASA's IceBridge scientists released the original photo last week, but it only showed part of the iceberg.

With much of the "berg out of the frame", it was unclear how geometric the structure was. New photos released by IceBridge scientists reveal the true shape of the iceberg. It's not a perfect rectangle, but it's still a very angular quadrilateral.

Jeremy Harbeck, Senior IceBridge Project Scientist, took these photos and spotted the tabular iceberg near the Larsen C ice floe. Tabular icebergs are the product of ice floes that slide – when large chunks of ice suddenly come off – and they are known for their very angular lines and their smooth top.

"I thought it was very interesting," Harbeck said in a statement from NASA. "I often see icebergs with relatively straight edges, but I have not really seen one before, with two angles as straight as this one."

In July 2017, the Antarctic ice sheet Larsen C released the huge A68 iceberg, which weighs about 1 trillion tons and occupies an area about the size of the state of Delaware. Harbeck and his colleagues were studying this massive structure when the geometric shape was spotted.

"I was actually more interested in catching the A68 iceberg than we were flying over, but I thought this rectangular iceberg was visually interesting and quite photogenic, so on a lark, I just took some pictures "said Harbeck.

Interestingly, Harbeck spotted a second rectangular iceberg on the same flyby on October 16, 2018. In the photo above, you can see three remarkable icebergs: the now-famous iceberg with bizarre geometry on the far left (slightly masked by the engines of the aircraft), the new tabular iceberg and, on the horizon, the iceberg A68. Yes it is this huge – the expanse along the horizon line is a free floating iceberg, measuring about 100 kilometers long and about 30 kilometers wide.

Here are other tabular iceberg pictures, many of which were produced by the Larsen C ice pack at the time of the A68 calving.

NASA's IceBridge operation is a permanent mission to monitor the polar regions and monitor the global climate system of the planet. It is currently a five-week project to map icebergs in the northern Antarctic Peninsula, with a mission scheduled for completion on 18 November. There is still a lot of time in the project. As a result, scientists will discover other Antarctic anomalies.