Earth’s Biggest Iceberg Breaks of From Ice Shelf

The European space agency have announced yesterday, 19^th May, 2021 that the world’s largest iceberg has reportedly broken off from an ice shelf in Antarctica and is floating through the Weddell sea.

 The iceberg named A-76 which is around 170km long and around 25 km wide with a surface area of about 4,320km is slightly larger than the Spanish island of Majorca in size.

Small Tabular Icebergs
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The iceberg, which broke off the western side of the Ronne Ice Shelf is caused by the increase by in the temperature in Antarctica.

Earth’s average surface temperature has gone up by one degree Celsius since the 19th century but the air over Antarctica has warmed more than twice that much causing more of these occurrences over the past few months.

Dolupo Balogun

Written by BoomRadioNG