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World’s Largest Glacier

 Antarctica is known for producing large icebergs, as they break off from ice shelves and ice sheets. The Sentinel-1 satellite from the European Space Agency scanned the area on May 13 and confirmed a giant free-floating iceberg breaks away from the shelf and named it A-76.

These ice-breaking events are known as calving. Calving is a term for the mechanical loss of ice from a glacier edge. Calving is most common when a glacier edge moves into the teer. The edge of the glacier moves into the ocean or a lake, it becomes unstable as it is no longer supported by solid land. A large chunk of ice can break off, creating a floating mass of ice (an iceberg).

This finger-shaped block of ice is around 170 kilometers (105 miles) long and around 25 kilometers (15 miles) wide. The 4,320 square kilometers (1,660 square miles) iceberg has been named A-76, after the Antarctic “A quadrant where it broke off. It is currently the largest iceberg in the world”.

Scientists don’t think that human-induced climate change caused the calving of A-76. It is common for an ice shelf to break off big like this, and calving events occur naturally. The A-76 is a part of the natural cycle of the ice shelves that did not break off gets for many decades. This A-76 glacier will not cause any change in sea level as it is a floating part before it gets breakoff.

 Credits: Sasi Kumar

 

                                                                              

 


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