A trillion-ton iceberg was created this week when a 5,800-square kilometer (2,200-square mile) chunk of polar ice snapped off the Larsen C ice shelf of Antarctica.
“The calving occurred sometime between Monday, July 10 and Wednesday, July 12,” the Swansea University said in a statement. “The iceberg weighs more than a trillion tons, but it was already floating before it calved away so it has no immediate impact on sea level.”
The iceberg chunk, about 350 meters (1,100 feet) thick, is larger than the state of Delaware in the U.S.
A crack in the Larsen-C ice shelf in on the Antarctic Peninsula first appeared several years ago, but recently it has been lengthening faster than before.
Carrying radar that can ‘see’ through the dark, the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites are monitoring the situation. The animation shows that the fissure had opened around 60 km since January last year. And, since the beginning of this January it split a further 20 km so that the 350 m-thick shelf was held only by a thread. The crack had extended around 175 km.
The iceberg created is one of the largest ever recorded. The neighboring Larsen-A and Larsen-B ice shelves suffered a similar fate with dramatic calving events in 1995 and 2002, respectively.
These ice shelves are important because they act as buttresses, holding back the ice that flows towards the sea.
The Sentinel-1 two-satellite constellation is indispensable for discovering and monitoring events like these because it continues to deliver radar images when Antarctica is shrouded in darkness for several months of the year.