World’s biggest iceberg is on the move – Saudi Gazette

World’s biggest iceberg is on the move – Saudi Gazette

LONDON — The world’s biggest iceberg — more than twice the size of Britain’s capital city — is on the move after decades of being grounded on the seafloor in Antarctica.The huge mass of ice broke away from the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf in 1986, calved and grounded on the Antarctic’s Weddell Sea floor almost immediately.The iceberg, named A23a, is about 400 meters (1,312 feet) thick, and almost 4,000 square kilometers (1,544 square miles) in area. Greater London, by way of comparison, is 1,572 square kilometers (607 square miles).West Antarctica — home to the Thwaites Glacier, also known as the “Doomsday glacier” — is the continent’s largest contributor to global sea level rise.Rapid melting in West Antarctica is ‘unavoidable,’ with potentially disastrous consequences for sea level rise, study findsBut now, nearly three decades later, the iceberg has probably shrunk enough in size to lose its grip on the seafloor as part of the natural growth cycle of the ice shelf, and has started moving, scientists Ella Gilbert and Oliver Marsh from the British