Jakarta –
After slowly wandering Antarctica for more than a year and just melting, unit G the largest in the world is fast approaching destruction.
Recent satellite images reveal that the giant iceberg known as the A-76A, about 135 kilometers long and 26 kilometers wide, is the largest fragment of the previously largest iceberg in the world, Rhode Island about the size of A-76.
The A-76A broke off from the west side of the Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica in May 2021, then fractured into three pieces: A-76A, A-76B and A-76C. On October 31, NASA’s Terra satellite captured this photo of an A-76A floating at the mouth of the Drake Passage, a deep waterway that connects the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans between Cape Horn in South Africa and the South Shetland Islands in the north of the Antarctic Peninsula.
The image shows that the iceberg currently lies between Elephant Island and the southern Orkney Islands at the southern end of the passage, but its trajectory suggests that it will head further north into the waterway in the weeks to come. .
Quoted by Live scienceFriday (11/11/2022) usually, when unit G Adrift in the Drake Passage, they were quickly swept east by strong ocean currents, before being thrown north into warmer waters, where they actually melted soon thereafter, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory.
To date, the A-76A has traveled approximately 2,000km since breaking away from the Antarctic Peninsula in 2021. So far, the mountain has managed to sustain a large amount of ice loss during its journey.
Data collected by the US National Ice Center in June revealed that the A-76A was almost exactly the same size as when it detached from its mother mountain more than a year ago.
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Photo: Lauren Dauphin / NASA Earth Observatory
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However, this intact condition could not last long as Drake’s Passage was known as an iceberg crusher on the way to the “water grave”. The main reason is the Antarctic circumpolar current (ACC).
ACC is the only fully flowing current in the world and contains more water than any other current on Earth. The ACC, which runs west to east across the Drake Passage, carries between 95 and 150 million cubic meters of water per second.
Consequentially, ice cubes those entering the Drake Passage are quickly swept away from Antarctica and dumped into warmer waters, where they quickly thaw.
ACC is not the only ocean current that helps determine the fate of icebergs. Other smaller currents also play a key role in the distribution and destruction of stray ice masses, but researchers are still trying to figure out exactly how.
On October 19, a study in the journal Science Advances revealed that another record-breaking iceberg, the A68a, which held the title of the world’s largest iceberg for about three years, was torn apart by strong ocean currents after avoiding for a hair a potential catastrophe.
It collided with South Georgia Island in late 2020. At the time, researchers were shocked when the huge iceberg suddenly broke in the middle of the ocean. Research reveals a sudden change of direction and the strength of the nearby current was the cause of the break unit G massively.
It is currently unclear how long the A-76A will remain in the Drake Passage, where it will end up, and how long it will last after turbulent currents carry the ice mass north.
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