It has been named A-76 and is currently the largest iceberg in the world. It measures 170 kilometres in length, 25 in width, and has a total surface area of 4,320 square kilometres. It is therefore almost the same size as the Italian region of Molise or the island of Majorca in the Balearics. On 13 May it broke away from the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica and began drifting through the Weddell Sea. The sighting was reported by the British Antarctic Survey and subsequently confirmed by the US National Ice Center.

This is a natural phenomenon

It was the European Sentinel 1 satellite, part of the Copernicus programme, that captured images of A-76 breaking off. "It is currently the largest iceberg, but it is not anomalous, as icebergs of this size break away from Antarctic ice shelves roughly every two years," glaciologist Massimo Frezzotti of the Department of Sciences at Roma Tre University told Ansa.

According to the expert, the calving of an iceberg is a physiological phenomenon and there would be no link to the climate crisis. "There is no relation to global warming, but this does not mean that climate change is not occurring in Antarctica. The problem we are observing is that the cryosphere is changing, and in Antarctica we do not know whether some glaciers have reached the point of no return," he concluded.

A-76 takes the place of A-68

This news comes approximately one month after the melting of A-68, which had in its time likewise been the world's largest iceberg. Its journey had begun in 2017, when it broke away from the Antarctic Larsen C ice shelf. At the time it measured nearly six thousand square kilometres in surface area — making it larger than the Italian region of Liguria — and weighed more than one billion tonnes. On 19 April, after a long journey, satellite images showed it had almost completely melted. A-68 had in fact split into small fragments which, according to the US National Ice Center, are no longer worth monitoring.