This past summertime , a massive ball of chicken feed slipped away from a glacier in British Columbia , but no one was there to notice . Using satellite images , a scientist from NASA has now spotted the unusually large iceberg — and he suspect it ’s the big ever seen in North America .
Glaciologist Mauri Pelto noticed the crisphead lettuce while analyzing quad - based pic of Porcupine Glacier in northern British Columbia . In previous August 2016 , an iceberg detached itself from the glacier and drifted into a lake . Pelto says “ it ’s the with child calving case in North America ” that he has ever interpret ( calving is when a glacier or iceberg split and sheds smaller pieces of ice ) .
Images bring by the Landsat 8 orbiter on August 28 bring out a 0.7 square mil ( 1.2 square klick ) crisphead lettuce floating northwest of the Porcupine Glacier . A second image shows the glacier before it relegate apart . The assumed - color images are shown in a inadequate infrared band to accentuate the various geological features , such as ice , snow , and piddle .
Speaking toThe Globe and Mail , Pelto enunciate he does n’t “ need to leap up and down and say it ’s the absolute biggest , ” but he says it ’s the largest iceberg lettuce he ’s ever seen in North America . The monolithic chunk of ice dwarfs other recent births , including large calving effect in Alaska in 2009 and 2010 .
NASA ’s Earth Observatoryexplainswhat happened :
As glacial frappe thins , it melts from above and below , becoming more susceptible to rifts ; finally icebergs break off along those crack . In the case of Porcupine , the berg break off from a floating “ ice tongue . ” Such ice formations float on a diminished amount of water , lacking the morphological reenforcement of a grounded destination clapper , which is hold up by the world and rock on the seafloor or riverbed beneath it .
From here , the iceberg will bear on to melt and produce its own icebergs until the whole thing vanish into the lake . The Porcupine Glacier itself , now much smaller , will continue to evolve as temperatures vacillate .
https://gizmodo.com/an-iceberg-six-times-the-size-of-manhattan-is-now-adrif-1565563122
big calving events like this one are strange for North America , but as Pelto pointed out , they ’re starting to happen more frequently ( thanks global thaw ! ) . Large calving events are also being documented in Antarctica , let in a 20 - naut mi - long ( 33 km ) glacier that broke loose from an Antarctic ice sheet of paper in 2013 . Sadly , it appear our world is quickly melting .
[ Globe and Mail , NASA Earth Observatory ]
mood changeglaciersGlobal warmingScience
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