World's biggest iceberg moving towards open ocean to risk shipping travel

The world’s biggest iceberg, which split-off from Antarctica, more than two years back has now started to move towards open ocean posing a serious threat towards the shipping vessels in the sea.

The reason it is called the world’s biggest iceberg is the size-6000 square kilometres- which is four times the size of the Greater London or more than the one and a half size of Karachi, a city of Pakistan.

Currently, the size of greater London is around 1500 square kilometres while that of Karachi is 3780 square kilometres.

The enormous berg, which weighs one trillion tonnes, broke off from the Antarctic in 2017 and has been steadily travelling north ever since.

A68 is currently at about 63 degrees South latitude, but once it reaches the open ocean it’s likely to break down due to rougher waters.

It’s being carried north by currents and in the last year has started to accelerate in its journey northwards towards South Georgia, an island in the southern Atlantic Ocean.

Rising waters and air temperatures caused by global warming are triggering instabilities along the coasts of Antarctica and Greenland, accelerating melting and increasing the rates of calving.

The scientists have, however, expressed their astonishment over the survival of the iceberg in the seawater for so long and said that as per their estimates, it should have been converted into small cubes by now.

‘If it survives for long as one piece when it moves beyond the edge of the sea-ice, I will be very surprised,’ a geology professor Adrian Luckman told a British outlet.

Objects as big as the A68 have to be constantly tracked as they could pose an obstacle or even a threat to ships.

Read More: Massive iceberg breaks off Antarctica 

‘If it becomes a risk really depends on the route the iceberg follows, but I guess that also the smaller bergs will be tracked and their location will be communicated to ships,’ Sef Lhermitte, professor of geoscience and remote sensing at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, told another British outlet.

Since it calved from Antarctica’s Larson C ice shelf two years ago, the iceberg rotated 270 degrees and drifted 155 miles north as of last summer, carried by the ocean current known as the Weddell Gyre.