SAN FRANCISCO, 13 July (BelTA - Xinhua) - A one-trillion-ton iceberg, one of the biggest ever recorded, has calved away from a part of the Larsen Ice Shelf, a long ice shelf in the northwest part of the Weddell Sea, extending along the east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, in Antarctica.
The calving, which was revealed Wednesday by Project MIDAS, an Antarctic research project based in the United Kingdom, occurred sometime between Monday and Wednesday this week, when a 5,800-square-kilometer section of Larsen C finally broke away.
The final breakaway was detected in data from a satellite instrument of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which images in the thermal infrared at a resolution of 1 kilometer, and confirmed by another instrument.
The iceberg was already floating before it calved away, so it has no immediate impact on sea level. The calving of this iceberg leaves the Larsen C Ice Shelf reduced in area by more than 12 percent, and the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula changed forever.
With a thickness of between 200 and 600 meters, the Larsen C floats at the edge of the Antarctic Peninsula, holding back the flow of glaciers that feed into it.
