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In mid - December , aNASAsatellite snap an look-alike of the disintegration of a large berg that first broke away from Antarctica nearly 12 eld ago , and has been wandering the Southern Ocean ever since .
It ’s not unusual for iceberg to survive for up to a after part century if they persist near their birthplace , in the frigid waters palisade Antarctica ; yet if they stray too far north , the monumental chunks of ice can quickly disappear , order Ted Scambos , a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado , Boulder .
Iceberg B-15J, in the upper-middle portion of the image, is a remnant of the colossal B-15 iceberg.
In March 2000 , the large iceberg ever measured broke by from theRoss Ice Shelf , a massive plain of floating ice-skating rink that clings to the coastline of Antarctica . The iceberg , dubbed B-15 , was a whopping 170 miles ( 270 km ) long and 25 miles ( 40 kilometer ) panoptic – intimately the sizing of Connecticut . Over sentence , the iceberg give away into smaller patch .
One of those pieces , known as B-15J , was spotted about 1,700 miles ( 2,700 kilometre ) southeast of New Zealand on Dec. 19 .
At the beginning of November , B-15J was roughly 12 miles ( 20 kilometre ) across , but has now break down to just a few miles breadth as it sail through warm piss , Scambos told OurAmazingPlanet .
Iceberg B-15J, in the upper-middle portion of the image, is a remnant of the colossal B-15 iceberg.
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iceberg are birthed by ice shelves , which are the retail store of glacier and on a regular basis air tremendous iceberg lettuce float out to sea in a natural outgrowth known as calving .
NASA researcher recently distinguish a hugerift in Western Antarctica ’s Pine Island Glacier frappe shelf , and they expect the shelf to calve in the coming months .
Mama iceberg: B-15, seen here on April 13, several weeks after it calved from the Ross Ice Shelf.
Although calving is a natural operation , someAntarctic ice shelvesare undergoing rapid , sometimes catastrophic change , and Scambos say that tracking icebergs as they evaporate is a good placeholder for scientist trying to see what is happening to icing shelf in general in a warming world .
icing shelves basically act as doorstopper for glaciers . When ice shelf go away or weaken , glaciers speed up , dumping ever more ice into the ocean and raising global sea levels .
Scambos sound out B-15J is rapidly disintegrating . " It ’s interchangeable to what happens to methamphetamine shelves when they go through a rapid thaw , " he say .
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" Icebergs do a sort of fast - forward through clime alteration as they drift northward , " Scambos said . " All the thing that go on in terms of run on the underside and melting on the open , they all happen at in high spirits amphetamine and dramatically with these large , tabular bergs . " [ Images : Antarctica , Iceberg Maker ]
Scambos said researchers are adjudicate to get some gamey - resolution orbiter images of B-15J as it melt aside , but it ’s difficult . The iceberg be active between 10 and 15 mile ( 16 and 24 kilometers ) a day , and it ’s a challenged to take aim the right planet want for such elaborated images – one operate by Taiwan – at such a little target .
The major pieces of iceberg B-15 have run through most of the alphabet , Scambos said . " It goes to at least B-15X , but the letter pieces are starting to break off into more musical composition — and below 10 kilometers [ 6 mi ] nobody tracks them , so there are literally thousands of piece of B-15 floating around , " he said .
