A 1,270km2, 150m-thick iceberg on Friday split off from Antarctica, near a British Antarctic Survey (BAS) station.
The separation occurred just more than 20km from Britain’s Halley research station, but there was no one at the base when the chunk separated from the Brunt Ice Shelf.
The BAS, which has been operating Halley in a reduced role since 2017 because of the concern that an iceberg might imminently split off, captured footage of large cracks in the area earlier this month.
Photo: AP
Large cracks in the ice of that part of Antarctica were first discovered a decade ago and the BAS has been monitoring the area in case of just such an event.
BAS has a range of GPS devices on the ice shelf that relay information about ice movements to the agency’s headquarters in Cambridge, England.
Adrian Luckman, British glaciologist and professor of geology at Swansea University in Wales, has been examining images of the area in the past few weeks and estimating when a large chunk of ice might break off from the glacier.
“Although the breaking off of large parts of Antarctic ice shelves is an entirely normal part of how they work, large calving events such as the one detected at the Brunt Ice Shelf on Friday remain quite rare and exciting,” Luckman told the BBC. “With three long rifts actively developing on the Brunt Ice Shelf system over the last five years, we have all been anticipating that something spectacular was going to happen.”
“Time will tell whether this calving will trigger more pieces to break off in the coming days and weeks,” he said.
“At Swansea University, we study the development of ice shelf rifts because, while some lead to large calving events, others do not, and the reasons for this may explain why large ice shelves exist at all,” he said.
The mobile research base relocated inland for safety reasons in 2016-2017 as cracks in the ice threatened to cut it off.
“That was a wise decision,” BAS director of operations Simon Garrod said.
Additional reporting by AFP
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