Remember the cubes of ice you used to draw and struggle to get into perfect proportions? Well, NASA has finally found your ‘childhood ice’!
NASA recently published an image of a nearly perfect, symmetrical rectangular iceberg in Antarctica. The huge slab of ice floated just off the Larsen C ice shelf.
New #IceBridge video: Mission Scientist John Sonntag provides commentary on footage from an Oct. 16 flight over the tabular iceberg that became social media famous, plus bonus icebergs and the massive A68 berg. pic.twitter.com/8nkeSCsj4G
— NASA ICE (@NASA_ICE) October 24, 2018
NASA took the image as part of a mission to picture Earth’s polar regions in order to understand how ice has been changing in recent years in terms of thickness, location, accumulation, etc. The mission is named as ‘Operation IceBridge’ .
This iceberg which is completely natural and unique is known as the ‘tabular iceberg’.
These types of icebergs have steep, nearly vertical sides and a flat plateau top. Tabular icebergs typically break off of ice shelves, which are cuboidal bodies of thick ice.
The icebergs that we see floating on the surface of the oceans are usually only 10% of the entire iceberg, the rest 90% lies under the surface. In this case, however, it is not very clear whether the iceberg is fully floating or partially sitting on the ocean bed.
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The size of a full formed independent iceberg is usually very huge. The world’s largest recorded iceberg is Iceberg B-15, measuring almost 295 kms long and about 40 kms wide.
This tabular icebergs carved itself out of Ross Ice Shelf in 2000. The map shows a more precise location of the iceberg. Towards the bottom, one can notice the Ross Ice Shelf, which produced the largest iceberg in history.
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Ice shelves are formed where land meets the ocean. As ice flows down to the ocean from the continental land mass, it splits across the ocean. It floats in some places while it is supported by the ocean bed in some places. Ice shelf is what is on the surface of the ocean but is attached to the land.