Satellite pictures display a novel 100-square-mile iceberg emanating from Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier. The calving event was expected but is also a major distress as far as the sea level rise is concerned.
Pine Island Glacier (PIG) is the speediest thawing glacier in Antarctica. It is also accountable for a quarter of the frozen continent’s ice deprivation, a stupendous 45 billion tons of ice each year. Satellite pictures display an open-water gap transpiring between the ice shelf and the iceberg which is four times bigger than Manhattan.
The novel iceberg seems to be very unbalanced furnishing a batch of smaller icebergs as it eventually drifts out to the sea. This berg is comparatively smaller is size when compared to one produced by the Antarctic Peninsula’s Larsen C ice shelf a few months ago, a massive wedge of ice that measures about 2,240 square miles.
Gizmodo got in touch with Christopher A. Shuman, a research scientist within the Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center who established the break using the MODIS and Landsat 8 satellites. The area expended by PIG encloses roughly 10 percent of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet defining it as a crucially salient attribute as far as its benefaction to sea level rise is concerned. This is the third important calving event yielded by this ice stream in four years.
Shuman told Gizmodo that the main issue is not the size of the bergs but it is the wholesome and gradual receding of the ice front with calving losses in 2013, 2015, and 2017, which is really a speedy retreat for any massive glacier chiefly one this remote far south in Antarctica.