![]() He returned to South Georgia Island on a later expedition and died of a heart attack in 1922. Shackleton and two crewmen were forced to traverse the island’s rugged peaks to reach a whaling station and to organize a rescue of the remainder of his crew, who were stranded on another island 700 miles away. The island is known as the final resting place of Ernest Shackleton, the British explorer who landed there after his ill-fated expedition to Antarctica in 1915. When it will impact the island is hard to say.” “A few weeks is probably a reasonable estimate. “They can move their own length in one day,” says David Long, director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Brigham Young University, which keeps a database of large Antarctic icebergs that are being tracked by satellite. Measuring 94 miles long and 30 miles wide, it's nearly as big as South Georgia Island itself, and is expected to arrive sometime in the next two weeks. ![]() Known officially as A-68A, the iceberg has been meandering north since it broke off from Antarctica’s Larsen Ice Shelf in September 2017. Hydrofracturing - when water seeps into cracks at the surface, splitting the ice farther down - was almost certainly the main culprit in each case.A massive Antarctic iceberg is headed straight for South Georgia Island, a remote outpost in the southern Atlantic Ocean that is home to millions of seabirds, penguins, and seals that may find their route to the sea blocked if the Delaware-sized chunk of ice gets stranded near their breeding grounds. ![]() This was followed by the breakup of the nearby Wilkins Ice Shelf in 20, and A68a in 2017. In 1995, however, a huge chunk broke off, followed by another in 2002. Up to the end of the 20th century, the Larsen Ice Shelf had been stable for more than 10,000 years. "The amount of ice going from the centre of the Antarctic continent out towards the edges is increasing in speed," Tarling said. They naturally break off from ice shelves as snow-laden glaciers push toward the sea.īut global warming has increased the frequency of this process, known as calving. Up to a kilometre thick, icebergs are the solid-ice extension of land-bound glaciers. "Over hundreds of years, this iceberg has accumulated a lot of nutrients and dust, and they are starting to leach out and fertilise the oceans." The incoming iceberg would also crush organisms and their seafloor ecosystem, which would need decades or centuries to recover.Ĭarbon stored by these organisms would be released into the ocean and atmosphere, adding to carbon emissions caused by human activity, the researchers said.Īs A68a drifted with currents across the South Atlantic, the iceberg did a great job of distributing microscopic edibles for the ocean's tiniest creatures, said Tarling. "Global numbers of penguins and seals would drop by a large margin," Geraint Tarling, also from the British Antarctic Survey, told AFP in an interview. If the iceberg runs aground next to South Georgia, foraging routes could be blocked, hampering the ability of penguin parents to feed their young, and thus threatening the survival of seal pups and penguin chicks. Seals also populate South Georgia, as do wandering albatrosses, the largest bird species that can fly. Many thousands of King penguins - a species with a bright splash of yellow on their heads - live on the island, alongside Macaroni, Chinstrap and Gentoo penguins. ![]() "We put the odds of collision at 50/50," Andrew Fleming from the British Antarctic Survey told AFP. Shaped like a closed hand with a pointing finger, the iceberg known as A68a split off in 2017 from Larsen Ice Shelf on the West Antarctic Peninsula, which has warmed faster than any other part of Earth's southernmost continent.Īt its current rate of travel, it will take the giant ice cube - which is several times the area of greater London - 20 to 30 days to run aground into the island's shallow waters.Ī68a is 160 kilometres (93 miles) long and 48 kilometres (30 miles) across at its widest point, but the iceberg is less than 200 metres deep, which means it could park dangerously close to the island. Icebergs naturally break off from Antarctica into the ocean, but climate change has accelerated the process - in this case, with potentially devastating consequences for abundant wildlife in the British Overseas Territory of South Georgia. The world's biggest iceberg is on a collision course with a remote South Atlantic island that is home to thousands of penguins and seals, and could impede their ability to gather food, scientists told AFP Wednesday.
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