Newly released satellite footage shows the world’s largest iceberg running aground near a remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean last month.
The timelapse video, published by Colorado State University’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, shows the iceberg, called A23a, becoming stuck in shallow waters about 90 kilometers (roughly 56 miles) off the southwestern coast of South Georgia Island over the course of March.
Slightly smaller than Rhode Island, A23a originally split from Antarctica’s Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986 and then remained grounded on the seabed in the Weddell Sea for over 30 years, according to the British Antarctic Survey. It began drifting in 2020 after gradually melting for years, and its migration was accelerated by currents and winds sweeping it north towards warmer air and waters, the BBC reported last year.
British Antarctic Survey oceanographer Dr. Andrew Meijers remarked that the iceberg running aground wouldn’t “significantly affect” the millions of animals that reside on South Georgia Island and make the area known as the “Serengeti of the Antarctic.”
There are also no permanent human settlements on the island, so humans won’t be affected either; however, there are two research stations at King Edward Point and on the nearby Bird Island that have peak summer populations of 44 and 10, respectively.
“If the iceberg stays grounded, we don’t expect it to significantly affect the local wildlife of South Georgia…In the last few decades, the many icebergs that end up taking this route through the Southern Ocean soon break up, disperse and melt,” Dr. Meijers said. “Commercial fisheries have been disrupted in the past however, and as the berg breaks into smaller pieces, this might make fishing operations in the area both more difficult and potentially hazardous.”
“It will be interesting to see what will happen now, [because] from a scientific perspective we are keen to see how the iceberg will affect the local ecosystem,” he continued. “Nutrients stirred up by the grounding and from its melt may boost food availability for the whole regional ecosystem, including for charismatic penguins and seals. We have several ongoing studies looking at exactly how ‘megabergs’ influence the ocean circulation, its chemistry, and the ecosystems they support.”
As for whether or not A23a’s history is linked to global warming, Dr. Meijers noted that iceberg activity is normal but increasing.
“Icebergs, including ‘megabergs’ like this one, are a completely normal part of the lifecycle of the Antarctic, and Greenland, ice sheets. They basically are pushed out into the ocean by the weight of continental ice behind, begin to float as ice shelves, and eventually break off as icebergs due to a combination of flexure by winds, waves, tides and ocean melting,” he explained. “However, observations show that the ice shelves have lost around 6000 giga tonnes of their mass since the year 2000, which is roughly matched by an increase in straight up melt of the ice shelves and aligns with a measured mass loss of the grounded ice over Antarctica attributed to anthropogenic climate change.”
South Georgia Island is a large body of land that is part of the British Overseas Territory of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.
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