The iceberg was once one of the largest on record. Now it's melting, and scientists are waiting to see how it's going to impact South Georgia's marine life.
When the massive A68A iceberg snapped off its ice shelf in July 2017, it was the sixth-largest iceberg on record. Now more than half of it is gone. shows that the massive block of ice had broken off from Antarctica's Larsen Ice Shelf in 2017 and traveled northeast to South Georgia by 2021. The iceberg once measured roughly 5,719 square kilometers — nearly half the size of Connecticut — but it started to disintegrate once it arrived to the South Georgia island in the Atlantic Ocean.
Researchers from the University of Leeds, Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling and British Antarctic Survey studied the iceberg through satellite imagery and found that throughout those years of travel the iceberg became smaller as it broke apart and gradually melted. Over its three-and-a-half-year journey, it's estimated that the iceberg lost roughly 544 cubic kilometers of its ice, about a third of which was due to basal melting.
This significant loss could result in"potentially impacting the island's rich ecosystem," the study says. It is possible, however, that other icebergs could end up grounded in the area in the future, which could potentially destroy organisms that reside on the seafloor . A grounded iceberg can also disrupt ocean currents and making it difficult for the island's penguins to feed in the sea, researchers said.Observing the disintegration of the A68A iceberg from spacethat the berg released a"huge amount of melt water.
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