Most iceberg-forming videos show the violence of glaciers calving, the groaning as thousands of tonnes of ice tip into the sea. But this slow sequence of photos from NASA’s satellites reveal a far more stately process.
The berg appears to have fractured from West Antarctica’s Getz Ice Shelf and moved out into in the Amundsen Sea sometime in mid- to late-February 2015. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites acquired these images spanning the calving event. The first image (left) shows the iceberg on February 16, when it was still attached to the ice shelf. By February 28 (middle), it appears to have separated somewhat. By March 5 (right), it is floating freely.
B-34, as the lovely chunk of ice you see drifting off has been named by National Ice Center, is a mind-meltingly-massive 27km long. If you cut from Yonkers over to New Rochelle, cut a few bridges, and then floated that out to see, you’d have something about the same size. And one hell of a party boat. [NASA Earth Observatory]