World’s largest iceberg breaks off from Antarctica

A humongous chunk of ice, almost 75 times bigger than Manhattan, has calved off Antarctica's Ronne ice shelf, according to the European Space Agency and British Antarctic Survey.

The finger-shaped chunk of ice, which is roughly 105 miles (170 kilometers) long and 15 miles (25 kilometers) wide, was spotted by satellites as it calved from the western side of Antarctica's Ronne Ice Shelf, according to the European Space Agency. The berg is now floating freely on the Weddell Sea, a large bay in the western Antarctic where explorer Ernest Shackleton once lost his ship, the Endurance, to pack ice.

The 1,667-square-mile (4,320 square kilometers) iceberg — which now the world’s biggest and has been called A-76, after the Antarctic quadrant where it was first spotted — was captured by the European Union's Copernicus Sentinel, a two-satellite constellation that orbits Earth's poles. The satellites confirmed an earlier observation made by the British Antarctic Survey, which was the first organization to notice the breakaway.

Images taken by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, which is comprised of two satellites in polar orbits, shows the slender berg's detachment from the shelf on May 16. It's total area exceeds the previous record holder, A-23A, by around 440 square kilometers. The US National Ice Center (USNIC) confirmed the iceberg had begun to break off on May 13. Both icebergs are now adrift in the Weddell Sea.

The continuous calving of the ice-shelf has been a cause of concern for scientists across the world, who have attributed it to global warming and climate change. Researchers in the UK have said that over one-third of the ice-shelves surrounding Antarctica could be at risk of collapsing and releasing massive amounts of water into the sea if global temperatures reach 4 degrees Celcius.

Published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the findings indicated that 34 per cent of the area on the ice-shelf could be at risk if temperatures rise by another 4-degree Celcius. of all the Antarctic ice shelves.

Average sea levels have risen by almost 29cm (nine inches) since 1880. If countries only fulfil their national climate targets, glaciers and ice sheets will melt at a speed that will raise sea levels twice as quickly as they would if they met the pledges enshrined in the Paris Agreement, according to a recent study published in Nature.