You’re looking at Pine Island Glacier. It pushes more ice to the sea than any other glacier in the world. And that gigantic 18-mile-long canyon? That’s the birth point of a new gargantuan iceberg, larger than New York City.
The huge crack has been discovered by NASA’s Operation IceBridge team, who took this photo aboard their retrofitted DC-8. The 18-mile-long crack goes as deep as 190 feet at some points and stretches 240 feet wide. It’s opening faster than expected and, when it completes the process, scientists expect that it will originate a 300-square-mile iceberg.
It’s the first time since 2001 in which such event has occurred. The Pine Island Glacier drains about 10 per cent of the West Antarctica ice sheet and, according to NASA, “scientists are concerned about the impact Pine Island’s continued thinning will have on sea level.”
The calving of this huge iceberg, however, seems to be part of the natural cyclical process not linked to global warming. According to Ted Scambos, the lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data centre, these “occur every few years, very similar in size and even shape. As a cyclical process, they are not part of the real climate-change/ice-shelf disintegration story.”
If you were planning to go on a cruise around West Antarctica, make sure to sail an unsinkable boat. [NASA Goddard Flickr and NASA]