Luxembourg-sized Iceberg Breaks Off a Piece of the Mertz Glacier
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons. By: Jacques.verron.
More pieces of ice are floating around the world and those pieces are getting bigger every year.
The Luxembourg-sized B9B iceberg collided with the floating Mertz Glacier, resulting in another large piece of ice breaking off the glacier. How large is it? The new iceberg is approximately 48 miles (78 km) long and 24 miles (39 km) wide. Oh, and it holds 1/5th of the world’s total yearly water usage.
The 2 icebergs are now drifting somewhere between 60 and 95 miles off the eastern side of Antarctica. While they are pretty large in size, they are not record-breaking in size. Speaking of breaking, it took 18 years for the B9B to break such a large chunk of ice off the glacier. Apparently, the B9B broke off another piece of Antarctica in 1987 and found its way to the Mertz Glacier. It’s been there ever since—well, at least until it finally broke that large chunk off it.
Researcher Benoit Legresy said the dislodging “was a slow process”. He also adds that the B9B was “sitting there, it must have been pushed and pulled by the current every day and used as a hammer to bang on the other one by the ocean currents”. He believes the ice finally broke off because of the iceberg’s location plus the warmer Antarctic summer water, which resulted in less sea ice.
Unfortunately, scientists have bigger problems to worry about than another floating piece of ice. Apparently, the area of water around the glacier was kept clear because of its importance to ocean currents. Now that part of the glacier has broken away, the cleared area could fill with sea ice. This would interfere with the water’s sinking ability and it’s this very kind of sinking water that supplies oxygen to the world’s ocean currents.
You may think, ‘well, the earth is covered with a lot of water, so this shouldn’t be a problem’, but it is. Even though a vast portion of this planet is under water, there are only a few places where this water sinking activity occurs. If one of their processes was slowed or stopped, it would mean less oxygen would be supplied to the deeper currents of the world.
To put things a bit more into perspective, chemical oceanographer, Mario Hoppema, stated:
“There may be regions of the world’s oceans that lose oxygen and then, of course, most of the life there will die.”
As for the pair of giant, migrating icebergs, scientists expect them to head west. However, they doubt you’ll see them as far north as Australia—at least not any time soon.
By Heidi Marshall
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Tags: Antarctica, climate change, global warming, iceberg B9B, icebergs, Luxembourg-sized iceberg, Mertz Glacier, sinking water
Makes a person wonder if huge land masses like this that collide, could cause continental plate shift, thus triggering earthquakes(chile??????).