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September 5 (UPI) – The Antarctic Iceberg A-68 has begun to turn. After a one year stop, the big piece of ice is moving.
A-68 was detached from the Larsen C ice sheet last July. Scientists predicted that the giant iceberg would begin to fragment shortly after its separation.
But over the past year, the A-68 has remained essentially intact, anchored to the Bawden ice floe, a shallow seabed at the edge of the Larsen ice floe. Scientists used satellite images to monitor the iceberg, but up to now there was little movement to report.
Now, a little over a year after its first separation, the A-68 is drifting again.
"The A-68s have started heading north," Mark Brandon scientists wrote in a blog.
The right combination of weather and ocean currents caused the iceberg to turn counterclockwise.
The iceberg has lost some big pieces, but it remains almost as massive as it was 13 months ago.
Its size is about four times larger than that of the city of London and its volume is twice that of Lake Erie. A-68 weighs over one trillion metric tons.
Last July, A-68 was the sixth largest ice floe of all time, with an area of 2,239 square miles, according to the Antarctic iceberg tracking database of Brigham Young University.
The bottom of the iceberg is likely to leave large nicks in the icy seabed sediments – gouges likely to be revealed by sonar surveys of the region planned later this year.
Now that the iceberg is moving, it is increasingly exposed to ocean currents and warmer waters. As a result, the A-68 will likely continue to turn and move away from the pack ice from which it was calved.
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