An iceberg twice the size of Atlanta is disrupting shipping lanes.
The massive iceberg is moving into the ocean off Antarctica. It measures 255 square miles and could be almost a third of a mile thick, scientists with NASA’s Earth Observatory said.
Since November, the iceberg called B31 has drifted out of Pine Island Bay and into the Amundsen Sea off of western Antarctica.
“The iceberg is now well out of Pine Island Bay and will soon join the more general flow in the Southern Ocean, which could be east or west in this region,” iceberg researcher Grant Bigg from the University of Sheffield in England said in the NASA statement.
Scientists fear that it will get difficult to track the iceberg as the winter comes, bringing long weeks of darkness.
The iceberg won’t melt soon; it could last up to a year, said scientist Robert Marsh with the University of Southampton.
It originally started drifting because of a crack.
Iceberg calving is a very normal process,” noted Kelly Brunt, a glaciologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in the announcement. “However, the detachment rift, or crack, that created this iceberg was well upstream of the 30-year average calving front of Pine Island Glacier (PIG), so this a region that warrants monitoring.”
