Thursday, July 13, 2017

Delaware-sized iceberg breaks off Antarctic ice shelf


I just wrote about icebergs last month, when I thought I'd show a video about them to my students.  I mentioned another potential iceberg to my students this week, when I told them an iceberg the size of a small state was about to break off the Larsen C ice shelf.  Yesterday, that happened, as CBS News reported in Huge iceberg breaks off Antarctic ice shelf.

An iceberg that scientists have been monitoring for months has finally broken off from Antarctica's Larsen-C ice shelf. Swansea University research officer Martin O'Leary, an iceberg expert on the UK-based Project MIDAS Antarctic team, spoke to CBSN about the impact of the ice shelf split.
Unlike the breakup of the Larsen B ice shelf, which is mentioned in "An Inconvenient Truth," this major calving event appears to have little to do with climate change.  That may change if the shelf continues to break up, but only time will tell.  In the meantime, I can show this to my students.  May they learn something from it.

2 comments:

  1. "Size of Delaware" means little to me, since I'm not familiar with Delaware. But when I heard that it contains enough water to fill Lake Erie twice, that impressed me. I've been out on Lake Erie a few times.

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    1. Good point, although Lake Erie is the shallowest and least capacious of the five Great Lakes. Still an impressive stat.

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