From there, they typically whip north toward the South Atlantic and quickly melt in the region’s warmer-but still chilly-waters. It still measured 135 kilometers long and 26 kilometers wide-a total area about twice the size of London.īut the Drake Passage often marks a turning point for icebergs. More than a year into its voyage, the berg’s size had not changed much. “That obviously speaks to the force of powerful currents in this part of the Southern Ocean.”īy October 2022, Iceberg A-76A had likely escaped the clockwise circulation of the Weddell Gyre and entered the Drake Passage-a turbulent body of water between South America’s Cape Horn and Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands. “It is impressive to think it ‘sailed’ that far in about two years,” said Christopher Shuman, a University of Maryland, Baltimore County, glaciologist based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. They were about 2,400 kilometers (1,500 miles) north of the berg’s origin near the Ronne Ice Shelf. But its size has dwindled during the past month as pieces have splintered off in warmer, more northern waters.Īt the time of this image, Iceberg A-76A and several newly separated pieces floated near the remote island of South Georgia. It shows Iceberg A-76A, which broke from A-76 shortly after the initial calving and remains the event’s largest surviving berg. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired this image on May 24, 2023. Two years later, only fragments of the former berg remain. At the time, it was the largest iceberg floating anywhere in the world. In May 2021, Iceberg A-76 broke from the Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica.
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