Over the years, he has heard from people who want to visit an iceberg. "It wouldn't be where it's supposed to be in the morning or in the evening or at night - even though it's 24 hours of daylight." "The ice that the base was built on would start to rotate, and that would make the sun do funny things in the sky," Scambos said. He recalls one odd thing: the disorientation. Its scale would simply fill the horizon any movement would be imperceptible. If you were to set foot on A23a, Scambos said, you likely wouldn't realize it's an iceberg, floating loose at sea. In February 1987, a Soviet ship, the Kapitan Kondratyev, tracked the iceberg down and deployed a landing party aboard a helicopter "to salvage the most valuable equipment from the station," as researchers noted in a recent academic paper. "When the A23 iceberg calved and floated off" in 1986, "Druzhnaya 1 was still on it," according to the U.S. For about 10 years, that included a Soviet station called Druzhnaya 1. Over the decades, the Filchner Ice Shelf has hosted several countries' research and mapping stations. Geological Survey A map shows the locations of research stations in Antarctica, focusing on the coast of the Weddell Sea. In late 1991, A23a became a separate iceberg. ![]() Its roots stretch to the austral winter of 1986, when the Filchner Ice Shelf's leading edge broke off to calve three huge icebergs: A22, A23 and A24. "It's truly a gargantuan piece of ice," Scambos said, noting that the iceberg is likely 1,000 to 1,200 feet thick. But that giant soon fractured into smaller icebergs, putting A23a back into the top spot. In 2021, for instance, it was supplanted by iceberg A-76, which broke from the Ronne Ice Shelf, also in the Weddell Sea. Here's a quick recap of the iceberg, its history and its potential future:Ī23a hasn't always held the title. But in recent years, it has been on the move again, after shaking loose. The iceberg then became grounded on the seafloor. When A23a was still part of an ice shelf, it held a Soviet research station - and it whisked that base off to sea when it floated away in the 1980s (more on that below). And New York City's Manhattan Island is about 13.4 miles long and spans around 2.3 miles at its widest point. ![]() For comparison, Hawaii's island of Oahu is 44 miles long and 30 miles across. Iceberg A23a measures 40 by 32 nautical miles, according to the U.S. So it's hard to comprehend just how big a patch of ice this is," Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, told NPR. Ships plying the frigid waters near the Antarctic Peninsula, south of South America, will need to keep an eye on their radar for a floating island of ice: "The largest iceberg in the world, A-23a, is on the move into open ocean!" as the British Antarctic Survey recently announced.
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