The satellite images come about a decade after satellite surveillance detected the growth of a previously dormant crack in the ice known as Chasm-1, revealing a slightly smaller iceberg named A74 on the same ice shelf. We captured a break that occurred almost two years after it separated from the Earth. A fissure is a crack in the ice shelf that extends from the surface all the way to the ocean below, and the ice shelf extends from a glacier formed on land. It’s a floating piece of ice.
Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said the iceberg “is a gigantic mass of ice weighing about 500 billion tons, but not the largest iceberg ever seen, comparable to Long.” wrote in an e-mail. small island. “
This birthing event is not expected to affect BAS’ Halley research station, which was relocated further inland in 2016 as a precautionary measure after Chasm-1 began to grow.
However, “new ruptures will bring the base to within about 10 miles of the ocean, and new ruptures are likely over the next few years, potentially necessitating another costly relocation of the station. ‘” Scambos wrote. The new iceberg is expected to follow a similar path to A74 into the Weddell Sea and will be named by the US National Ice Center.
Unlike some previous icebergs and collapsed ice shelves that have been linked to climate change, the BAS press release said the collapse was a “natural process” and “evidence that climate change played an important role.” No,’ he said.
Rather, in a 2019 BBC article, Hilmar Gudmundsson, a glaciology researcher at Northumbria University, said the cracks began to grow due to “accumulated stress from the natural growth of the ice shelf.”
Scambos likens the fragmentation of an iceberg to a wooden plank chisel. “In this case, the flea was a small island called ‘McDonald’s Icerise,'” Scumbos wrote. “Ice was pushed against this rocky seamount by ice flows, forced to break apart, and eventually detached from the floating ice shelf.”
“Sometimes these large iceberg breaks are as big and spectacular as small states. But they’re just part of how the Antarctic ice sheet works,” says Scambos. “Most of the time it has nothing to do with climate change.”
