By Le Figaro with AFP
Posted 2 hours ago, updated 7 minutes ago
The 1,550-square-kilometer block of ice broke off during a high tide that widened an existing crack in the ice.
A giant iceberg, more than 15 times the size of Paris, broke away from Antarctica on Sunday, British scientists said on Monday. This phenomenon is not due to climate change, although according to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the region is threatened by global warming.
The 1,550-square-kilometer block of ice broke away from the pack ice between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. Sunday during a high-amplitude tide that enlarged an existing crack in the ice, dubbed Chasm-1, this research organization detailed in the polar zones, in a news release .
An expected release
Two years ago, an almost identically sized iceberg dubbed the Brunt Barrier, on which the British research station Halley VI is located, had already formed in the same area. The glaciologists, who are on site from November to March, have been observing the course of huge cracks in the ice for ten years.
In 2016, BAS decided to move this station about twenty kilometers, fearing that once the ice melted, it would end up on a floating iceberg. “This detachment was expected and is a natural behavior of Brunt’s barrier. It has nothing to do with climate change,” explained glaciologist Dominic Hodgson, quoted in the press release.
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However, the continent is suffering the anguish of global warming, with record temperatures recorded like elsewhere on Earth last year. In February 2022, the extent of the ice there reached the minimum ever measured in 44 years of satellite observations, the annual report of the European climate change program Copernicus recently instructed.
In 2021, the complete melting of an iceberg 4000km north of where it broke off the ice pack in 2017 released more than 150 billion tons of nutrient-mixed freshwater, worrying scientists about the phenomenon’s impact on a delicate ecosystem.
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