Antarctica: Giant Iceberg Peels Off

In the west of Antarctica a huge ice shelf called "C Ice Shelf" peeled off, the Bremenhavener Alfred-Wegener insitute for polar and oceanic science reports on Wednesday. At the moment it drifts into the north and will take about two to three years to melt.

With 175 kilometres length and up to 50 kilometres width it is the biggest ice colossus that scientists have noticed in the last three decades. There is no danger created to humans from the 6000 square metres big giant.

Image: AFP, thinkstockphotos.de

Satellite "Sentinel-1B" image showing the ice shelf
Image: ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

In January the crack in the ice shelf (picture below) was already 175 kilometres long, but a long time nothing happened. Between the 25th and 31th of May the crack got about 300 to 500 metres longer and only a single 13 kilometres long part connected the iceberg with the ice shelf. In July the crack got longer and longer til it forked.

The crack in the Larsen-C-Ice-Shelf seen from within an airplain
Image: NASA/John Sonntag

The huge crack in the shelf ice Larsen C
Image: British Antarctic Survey

Such peel offs are not unusual. From time to time gigantic icebergs peel off the ice shelf - that swimming mass of ice which is connected to the glaciers.

Foto: AFP

Some examples are:

• The biggest - through satellite recognition - noticed colossus peeled off in May 2000 from the antarctic Ross Ice Shelf. B15 - that's it name - was formerly 11,600 square kilometres big.
• From this ice shelf B15A peeled off later, with a size of more than 2500 square kilometres.
• Three years before the C19 named iceberg peeled off, with the size of about 6000 square kilometres.

Iceberg in the Rothera-Bay Antarctica
Image from: Robert Ricken, Alfred-Wegener-Institut

In the same year a huge iceberg peeled off the Thwaites-Glacier in the west of Antarctica. B22 occupied an area of about 5500 square kilometres. At the beginning of the year 2010 C28 peeled off the Metz-Glacier in the Australian Antarctica with a size of more than 2500 square kilometres. Before, another ice colossus named B9 had crashed against the ice front.

Ice masses under permanent monitoring

Regarding to the US - Space - Administration NASA year over year, about 45 million tons of ice get lost. The Larsen-Ice-Shelf is heavily affected since 25 years. Most recently in the year of 2002 about 720 billion tons of ice have vanished through the peel off of Larsen B.