World’s biggest iceberg on move after decades of being grounded on Antarctica seafloor: Report

The iceberg broke away from the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf in 1986, calved and grounded on the Antarctic’s Weddell Sea floor almost immediately.

Washington DC: The world’s biggest iceberg is on the move after decades of being grounded on the Antarctica seafloor. The iceberg is more than twice the size of Britain’s capital city of London, as per CNN.

The iceberg broke away from the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf in 1986, calved and grounded on the Antarctic’s Weddell Sea floor almost immediately.

The iceberg, named A23a, is about 400 meters (1,312 feet) thick, and almost 4,000 square kilometers (1,544 square miles) in area. Greater London, by way of comparison, is 1,572 square kilometres (607 square miles), as per CNN.

Scientists Ella Gilbert and Oliver Marsh from the British Antarctic Survey told CNN that nearly three decades later, the iceberg has probably shrunk enough in size to lose its grip on the seafloor as part of the natural growth cycle of the ice shelf, and has started moving.

Since the 1980s, A23a has held the “largest current iceberg” title several times, occasionally being surpassed by larger but shorter-lived icebergs, including A68 in 2017 and A76 in 2021, they added.

The iceberg, carried by ocean currents, will likely head eastward, and at its current rate is travelling five kilometres (three miles) a day.

Gilbert and Marsh added that while this particular iceberg probably broke away as part of the natural growth cycle of the ice shelf, climate change is driving changes in Antarctica’s ice and the continent is losing enormous quantities of ice every year, as per CNN.

Meanwhile, it was recently reported that Glaciers in Switzerland are shrinking and have lost a total of ten per cent of their ice volume over a period of two years as a combination of low snowfall and soaring temperatures which caused unprecedented melting, according to figures released on Thursday, CNN reported.

The glaciers lost four per cent of their total volume in 2023, according to data from the Swiss Commission for Cryosphere Observation of the Swiss Academy of Sciences. This level of melting is second only to the record set in 2022 when six per cent of glaciers were destroyed.

Swiss glaciers have lost as much ice over this two-year period as was lost over the three decades between 1960 and 1990.