Spectacular new images of what is currently the world’s largest iceberg show how erosion has carved huge arches and cavernous depressions into the colossus. The recordings were made from an Eyos Expeditions ship on January 14th, the BBC reported.
Iceberg A23a is currently drifting through the ocean away from Antarctica. It will be ground up by the warmer air and surface water it encounters. “Eventually it will melt and disappear,” the station wrote. When this will happen is unclear. A23a is around 4,000 square kilometers in size, i.e. around 4.5 times the size of Berlin.
“We saw waves, a good three or four meters high, hitting the mountain,” expedition leader Ian Strachan told the BBC. He therefore spoke of a “constant state of erosion”. The Eyos team got close enough to the iceberg in mid-January to take drone footage. The 30-meter-high cliffs of the mountain were surrounded by thick fog. “It was dramatic and beautiful to photograph,” Eyos videographer Richard Sidey told the station.
The European space agency Esa reported in December, citing satellite images, that the currently largest iceberg was moving comparatively quickly away from Antarctic waters. The iceberg broke off the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in 1986, but remained stuck on the seabed for a long time. It had loosened up by 2020, but it is only now that it is making a spurt, driven by winds and currents. Like most icebergs from the so-called Weddell sector, it will probably end up in the South Atlantic, according to ESA.
