#Largest iceberg breaks off antarctica download#
#Largest iceberg breaks off antarctica crack#

One way to assess the health of ice sheets is to look at their balance: when an ice sheet is in balance, the ice gained through snowfall equals the ice lost through melting and iceberg calving. Ice shelves fringe 75 percent of the Antarctic ice sheet.

#Largest iceberg breaks off antarctica download#

Download additional imagery from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio. Image from July 12, 2017, from the MODIS instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite. Darker colors are colder, and brighter colors are warmer, so the rift between the iceberg and the ice shelf appears as a thin line of slightly warmer area. Thermal wavelength image of a large iceberg, which has calved off the Larsen C ice shelf. “Will the ice shelf weaken? Or possibly collapse, like its neighbors Larsen A and B? Will the glaciers behind the ice shelf accelerate and have a direct contribution to sea level rise? Or is this just a normal calving event?” “The interesting thing is what happens next, how the remaining ice shelf responds,” said Kelly Brunt, a glaciologist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and the University of Maryland in College Park. Now that the close to 2240 square-mile (5800 square kilometers) chunk of ice has broken away, the Larsen C shelf area has shrunk by approximately 10 percent.

#Largest iceberg breaks off antarctica crack#

In 2014, a crack that had been slowly growing into the ice shelf for decades suddenly started to spread northwards, creating the nascent iceberg. Larsen C, a floating platform of glacial ice on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula, is the fourth largest ice shelf ringing Earth’s southernmost continent. The final breakage was first reported by Project Midas, an Antarctic research project based in the United Kingdom. The calving of the massive new iceberg was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite, and confirmed by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite instrument on the joint NASA/NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi-NPP) satellite. An iceberg about the size of the state of Delaware split off from Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf sometime between July 10 and July 12.