In the end it broke away, and it is the size of Liguria. It is iceberg A68, which is no longer part of the Larsen C Antarctic peninsula. The risk is that it collapses entirely.
A giant iceberg, the size of Liguria, broke away on the morning of 12 July – as widely predicted by observers – from the Antarctic peninsula and is now drifting in the Weddell Sea, that part of the Atlantic Ocean bordering Antarctica. The news was announced by researchers at the British University of Swansea, in Wales, which has been monitoring the phenomenon since 2014. The block of ice is called A68 and is among the largest ever observed by humans, with more than 5,800 square kilometres of surface area, a thickness of 200 metres (30 of which above water) and a weight of one trillion tonnes; it contains water equivalent to three times that of Lake Garda.
The new iceberg, which will now force a revision of geographical maps, broke off from the Larsen C ice shelf and was photographed both by the European satellite Sentinel 1 launched under the Copernicus programme promoted by the European Space Agency (Esa) and the European Commission, and by Nasa's (National aeronautics and space administration) Aqua satellite. The ice shelf is now 12 per cent smaller than it was before the calving. This is the smallest extent it has reached in 11,700 years.
Now, according to researchers, the Larsen C ice shelf could face the same tragic fate as the Larsen A ice shelf, which collapsed in 1995, and, even more significantly, Larsen B, which disintegrated in 2002 following a similar fracture event. "The iceberg, for now, is one large single piece, but it could break into smaller fragments, some of which may drift northward into warmer waters," wrote meteorologist Daniele Berlusconi of 3Bmeteo.com.
"The calving of this enormous iceberg could be the first step in the collapse of the Larsen C ice shelf, which would cause a vast area of ice to disintegrate into numerous icebergs and smaller fragments," glaciologist David Vaughan, director of the British Antarctic Survey (Bas), had stated in January. Even though the purpose of the research is to document the effects of global warming in Antarctica, "the glaciologists of Midas (a British research project)," Berlusconi continues, "state that this is in any case a natural event not necessarily linked to human-induced global warming, but that global warming creates a series of risks for the entire ice shelf, as it makes it far more unstable."
