Newser– Welcome, iceberg A68. The trillion-ton chunk of ice broke off from an Antarctic ice shelf at some point over the last few days and is now officially its own entity. If “trillion-ton” is a little hard to grasp (more on that below), just know that the long-expected breakaway means that maps of Antarctica will have to be redrawn, notes Vox. The ice shelf from which it came, known as Larsen C, is now 12% smaller and dropped in the rankings of ice shelves from No. 4 to No. 5, per a map from the Antarctic Report. Coverage:
- What happened: For the basics, see this New York Times graphic, complete with maps and explainers. Scientists had been watching the rift grow for years, and they spotted a dramatic 90-degree turn in May.
- No. 3: A video from Tech Insider says A68 (the name isn’t official yet) could rank as the third-largest iceberg in history. It’s 620 feet thick and covers 2,200 square miles. The video also explores why the crack began accelerating in 2014, once it broke through a protective “suture zone” of the ice shelf.
- Climate change? There’s no scientific consensus on whether climate change is to blame because iceberg “calving” is a natural process in the Antarctic. But the debate is on: “For me, there is no doubt that this event is not part of a natural cycle,” a NASA and UC-Irvine scientist tells the Washington Post. “We’re not aware of any link to human-induced climate change,” says a Swansea University glaciologist.
- Comparisons: Media outlets tried to make the size relatable to local readers, which is why we learned the iceberg is “about the size of Delaware” (NBC News), “twice the size of Luxembourg” (Guardian), “a quarter the size of Wales” (BBC), “roughly the size of … the Indonesian island of Bali” (Reuters), “roughly four times the size of the city of London” (UPI), “deeper than the Eiffel Tower is tall” (USA Today), and has “twice the volume of Lake Erie” (the AP), and on and on.
President Trump caused the break off, so he can bottle all the fresh water to compete with Fiji for being the purest in the world.
Of course this is a wild supposition, but it will be news later in the cycle.
I find visualizing stuff like this easier by estimating how big a cube it would be. This berg contains enough ice to make a cube roughly 10 kilometers on a side.
It’ll take a lot of rye whiskey to do justice to that size ice cube!
Trillion, aw heck. That’s minuscule compared to the near 20 trillion national debt.
Polar bear real estate prices are skyrocketing as we speak.
It’s the Russians. It’s just got to be the Russians. Who else is sinister enough to pull this off?
DAMN YOU VLAD!!!
twice the size of Lena Dunham
It’s definitely climate change. Scientists now agree, 97% of them anyways, the cure is for all progressive cisgender privileged liberal betas to walk off a cliff with a muslim under each arm riding a fake news anchor and gangs of illegal mexicans in helicopters with 30 minutes of fuel filming the whole 60 minute show above Algore’s estate after he took in a million refugees.
I wasn’t around then, but I am pretty sure this has been going on for 1000 of years
before there were liberals to bitch about it.
Fake News
Fake science
Fake Men
Fake Women
What a world we live in
Lars Larson today spent some of his show talking about the new glacier formed in the cone of Mt. St. Helens. No one from Global Warming R Us could be reached for comment.
Charlie W. And Rosie O’Donnell, combined.
If they were still stuck on global cooling they would blame that, saying too much ice is forming…
One trillion? How do they know it’s not 995 Billion? No matter, the ice is floating and displacing all the water it ever will, hence net sea level rise equals zero.
Fuck global warming liberal asshole idiots.
Instead of man made globull warming, the argument could be made for globull COOLING, that would allow an ice shelf to grow to 1 trillion tons before calving.
could it be…….RUSSIAN HACKERS?
Not that it matters much in the discussion, but polar bears live only in the arctic region and penguins live only in the antarctic. I’m just showing off so that you know all rednecks aren’t completely stupid.
Stick around for the next 100 years. An ice shelf will form between the newly separated ice mass and the old mass, expanding the overall ice sheet significantly. But I don’t think anyone will be around to print a retraction.
Damn you Shakleton !
Can we hit commiefornia with it?
@OldRedneck – Then there are the Galápagos penguins some of whom live ever so slightly north of the equator, and so very much non-Antarctic. But you’re definitely not stupid! Not many people know of the Galápagos penguins.