After five years of being the world’s largest free-floating object, the B-15A iceberg has broken into smaller pieces off Antarctica’s Cape Adare.
ESA’s Envisat satellite’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) is sensitive to ice, and has been tracking the movement of the drifting ice object continuously since the beginning of this year. Its latest imagery reveals the bottle-shaped iceberg split into nine knife-shaped icebergs and a myriad of smaller pieces on 27-28 October, the largest being formed by fractures along the long axis of the original single iceberg.
Measuring – until last week – around 115 kilometres in length with an area exceeding 2500 square kilometres, the B-15A tabular iceberg had apparently run aground off Cape Adare, the northernmost corner of the Victoria Land Coast. This stranding appears to have led to flexing and straining which resulted in the break-up.
European Space Agency: Envisat shows behemoth B-15A iceberg breaking up
