UNITED STATES: The NASA IceBridge team saw Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf when they flew over it. Although icebergs frequently have straight edges, this rectangular shape is rare.
The space agency described the image as “a picture of sea ice reaching to the horizon, taken from a low-flying aircraft.” Dark blue is the colour of the ocean, where it can be seen through the ice.
“The large part of the ocean’s surface is layered with rough-appearing white ice, which is patched with sea ice icebergs,” says the author.
“The icebergs rise above the sea ice and have flat tops and sheer edges. Perspective is difficult to discern at this distance, but the icebergs soar high above the ocean. An iceberg takes up most of the frame’s centre.”
The rectangular iceberg is thought to have broken off from Larsen C, a huge ice shelf that extends along the eastern coast of the Antarctic Peninsula in the northeastern Weddell Sea.
The gigantic A68 iceberg, which has a surface area of around 6,000 square kilometres, or nearly the size of Delaware state in the US, was released from the same Larsen C ice shelf in July 2017.
Between 2009 and 2019, Operation IceBridge sent out aircraft outfitted with specialised equipment to fly over Earth’s polar regions to observe sea ice, ice sheets, and glaciers.
This mission has aided scientists in their understanding of how the polar ice on Earth is adjusting to climate change.
Also, IceBridge helped fill in the gap between NASA’s ICESat (Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite) missions to the poles in terms of observations.
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