Iceberg A-76: World's largest iceberg

On May 13th, satellites spotted the world’s greatest iceberg breaking off from its ice shelf. This chunk of ice is in the shape of a finger and its floating mass covers a bit more than 1600 square miles. It is approximately 105.6 miles in length and around 15.5 miles wide. It broke off from the Ronne ice shelf and is currently floating around in the Antarctic Weddell Sea. Its entire area is roughly 70 times more than that of the city of Manhattan in New York. The European Space Agency, more commonly known as the ESA, is the organization that gave the iceberg the title A-76.

It is quite common for a block of ice or a glacier to break off from an ice shelf. Events like calving occur naturally, due to platforms of ice advancing and contracting. In the past few decades, however, there has been a significant amount of climate change affecting areas like the Antarctic region. Global warming could cause the sheet of ice to accelerate its retreat, therefore causing it to collapse.

The ice floes in Antarctica are warming up at a faster pace than every other area, thus resulting in the melting of its ice and snow. That is the main reason why the glaciers are retreating. When this happens the ice does not extend as much as it did before, causing big blocks of ice to break off from the rest and float away. Though this is occurring in many parts, it has been mainly going on in and around the Weddell sea. It has, however, been made clear that the A-76 iceberg did not break off due to climate change. Currently, people believe that the berg broke off due to the periodic calving of ice. ESA has mentioned that the previous berg that was known to be the largest was the floe known as A-23A. Iceberg A-23A is also currently floating in the Weddell Sea, and has either been moving very slowly or remained in the same place for a long while.

An iceberg is given their title based on when and where they were first noticed. If a floe has been formed from an iceberg that has already been named, then the new berg is given a subsequent letter at the end of its appellation. Antarctica is divided into four quadrants. The letters A, B, C, and D are used to designate these quadrants. A-76 was first observed in the Bellinghausen/Weddell Sea quadrant. A-76 is the 76th iceberg that has been tracked by the National Ice Center of the United States.

Although the A-76 is huge, the largest iceberg to be ever recorded in history is the berg known as B-15, which is approximately 3 times larger than A-76. When the B-15 iceberg broke off, it covered an area of roughly 4200 square miles.

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