Thud! Long-Island-Sized Iceberg Smashes Into Antarctic Glacier

[hatrack]

An enormous iceberg, C-16, rammed into the well-known Drygalski Ice Tongue, a large sheet of glacial ice and snow in the Central Ross Sea in Antarctica, on March 30th, breaking off the tongue’s easternmost tip and forming a new iceberg.

This animation, comprised of images acquired by Envisat’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR), shows the iceberg and the ice tongue before and after the collision.

EDIT

Very cool photograph at first link below:

http://www.livescience.com/imageoftheday/siod_060410.html

See also:

EDIT

C-16 was formed in 2000 when Iceberg B-15A, measuring 27 kilometres by 161 kilometres, bumped into the jutting edge of the Ross Ice Shelf and snapped a large piece off. The new iceberg, originally named B-20 and later changed to C-16, then ran aground north of Ross Island. Over the last three months it had escaped its perch and made its way north where it collided with the ice tongue last week.

The National Ice Center (NIC), located in Maryland, USA, names icebergs according to the quadrant in which they are originally sighted. There are four quadrants (A, B, C and D). A sequential number is then assigned to the iceberg. B-20 was first spotted in the B quadrant and was the twentieth iceberg to be logged in that area. When B-20 navigated to the C quadrant, it was renamed to C-16.

NIC named the new iceberg, the piece of the ice tongue which broke off as a result of the C-16 collision, C-25, which measures 13 kilometres by 11 kilometres.

Envisat’s ASAR acquired these images in Wide Swath Mode (WSM), providing spatial resolution of 150 metres. ASAR can pierce through clouds and local darkness and is capable of differentiating between different types of ice.

EDIT

http://www.globalsurfnews.com/news.asp?Id_news=21153

[Pacifist Patriot]

1. I wonder how many people stumbling upon this...

understand what it means.

[MrMonk]

2. It means that there's an iceberg the size of Long Island

and it's only a fragment of an earlier iceberg.

My mind is stuck on that for now.
Later, it might deal with the effect of global warming on the rate of iceberg formation, and the addition of fresh water to the oceans.

[NYC]

3. I don't really understand what it means.

I don't understand the ramifications.

[Pacifist Patriot]

4. I'm just referring to Global Warming...

and the far right's insistence that it isn't a fact. Nothing terribly sophisticated.

[NYC]

7. Not just the far right.

There are people on the left who watch too much television. They are not convinced it is a manmade problem.

I'm not sure what that means. Does it mean we can just shrug and ignore it since we didn't cause it? Just sit back and wait to die, since it won't kill us in our lifetime, anyway? I think that's what it means, but I'm not sure.

[hatrack]

5. Part of the idea is the "cork in the bottle concept"

What they've found with collapsing ice shelves (Larsen A & B in Antarctica, notably) is that when ice shelves collapse, they tend to cause the glaciers feeding them to speed up. "Surge" is a relative term when you're talking about glaciers, but surge they do, sometimes doubling the rate at which they flow to the sea.

So, although the collapse of a floating ice shelf has no net effect on sea level, freeing up the glaciers behind it to flow faster may very well have just such an effect - and that's what they're thinking about here - the possibility that a berg that size smashing into the Drygalski may speed its breakup and/or flow as well.

[NYC]

6. Thanks.

I honestly figure we've hit a point when just about everthing has speeded up or will.

I still hear people say that they don't know if it is a manmade problem. I don't bother anymore. I figure they'll suffer the consequences whether they know what him them or not.

[Dead_Parrot]

8. Well, I must say...

...the bit knocked off looked about ready to calve anyway. I doubt the glacial movement is affected much.

Having said that, I'd rather be reading about these events every 10 years, rather than every couple of months as we are doing now. :(

[hatrack]

9. Yeah, hard to tell - there were some big cracks in the Drygalski

But I don't know how long they'd been there.