Published: February 6, 2018

A massive tabular iceberg (Photo: Mark Seth Lender)

Living on Earth's Resident Explorer Mark Seth Lender describes an encounter with a tabular iceberg similar (though much smaller) to the one that recently broke off of the Larsen C ice sheet.

Just off the Antarctic Peninsula at 63°0'58" S 57°40'52" W, I encountered a tabular iceberg [an iceberg that looks like a huge tabletop] that I believe to have been a fragment of the Larsen B Ice Shelf that broke up 2002. But “fragment” doesn’t do justice to what I saw. Picture New York’s Central Park, made of ice, and 120 feet high.

To give you an idea of the scale, the Antarctic Petrels soaring in front of the leading edge of the berg have a wingspan of one meter! In order to take a photo of an entire side, I had to wait until our ship had steamed some miles past. The tabular iceberg that just separated from Larsen C is many times larger than the giant pictured here.

 

NASA: “Massive Iceberg Breaks Off from Antarctica”
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/massive-iceberg-breaks-off-from-antarctica

Mosaic of Antarctica from the National Snow & Ice Data Center
http://nsidc.org/data/moa

Mark Seth Lender’s website
http://marksethlender.com

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