According to several media outlets, an iceberg that is considered to be larger than Los Angeles has broken off Antartica’s Amery Ice Shelf.
The discovery was made last Thursday by scientists at the Australian Antartic Program, Institute for Marine and Antartic Studies and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, according to CNN.
The iceberg is somewhere around 632 square miles and is the largest piece from that shelf that was separated for the past century. The iceberg contains over 315 billion tons of ice confirmed the scientists who are tracking the area for the past 20 years after the first signs of separating began to appear.
Helen Amanda Fricker, a glaciologist was talking with CNN on the subject as she said that the scientists predicted that a split will occur somewhere between 2010 and 2015 after something similar happened on the same ice shelf fifty years ago.
‘’I am excited to see this calving event after all these years. We knew it would happen eventually, but just to keep us all on our toes, it is not exactly where we expected it to be,’’ said Fricker, adding that she does not believe the event is linked to climate change but is rather a part of the ice shelf’s normal cycle, where we see major calving events every 60-70 years.
‘’This event is part of the ice shelf’s normal cycle though and, while there is much to be concerned about in Antartica, there is no cause for alarm yet for this particular ice shelf,’’ said Fricker on her Twitter account.
According to The Hill, NASA announced that an iceberg the size of New York City would soon separate from Antartica’s Brunt Ice Shelf. The iceberg break could become one of the largest ever recorded from the shelf, NASA said at the time.
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