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Image source, EYOS EXPEDITIONS/Richard Sidey
Published50 minutes ago
Erosion is sculpting dramatic features into the world’s biggest iceberg in what’s likely to be the final months of its existence.
A ship run by the Eyos expeditions company arrived at the frozen behemoth, A23a, on Sunday to find huge caves and arches cut into its frozen walls.
The berg is being ground down by the warmer air and surface waters it’s encountering as it drifts slowly away from the White Continent.
Ultimately, it will melt and disappear.
“We saw waves, a good 3m or 4m high, smashing into the berg,” said expedition leader Ian Strachan.
“These were creating cascades of ice – a constant state of erosion,” he told BBC News.
A23a broke away from the Antarctic coastline way back in 1986, but it’s only recently begun a big migration.
For more than 30 years, it was stuck rigidly in the bottom-muds of the Weddell Sea, like a static “ice island” measuring some 4,000 sq km (1,500 sq miles) in area. That’s more than twice the size of Greater London.
The colossus is presently entrained in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the great sweep of water that circles the continent in a clockwise direction.
This current, together with the prevailing westerlies, is pushing A23a in the general direction of the South Orkney Islands, which are about
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