Antarctica is shedding one of the largest icebergs in history — big enough to fill Lake Michigan
Dave Mosher
. Antarctica is about to lose a very large iceberg that could calve "within days" or hours.
. The iceberg will rival the volume of Lake Michigan.
. It may be the third-largest iceberg recorded since satellites began taking photos of Earth.
. Human activity likely isn't responsible for this event, but carbon emissions are driving other worrisome changes to Antarctic ice.
A widening, meandering crack in an Antarctic ice shelf is about to birth a colossal iceberg, and new satellite imagery gives the best sense yet of the object's mind-boggling size.
Researchers noticed the distinctive rift in Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf in 2010, but that fissure has been growing most rapidly since 2016.
Now just 2.8 miles of ice is keeping the iceberg connected to Larsen C, wrote Adrian Luckman, a glaciologist at Swansea University in the UK, in a July 6 tweet.
"It is remarkable how the moment of calving is still keeping us waiting," Luckman and his colleague Martin O'Leary wrote in a July 7 blog post for the Impact of Melt on Ice Shelf Dynamics and Stability project, known as Project MIDAS. "[T]his event will fundamentally change the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula."
more:
http://www.businessinsider.com/antarctica-iceberg-size-volume-2017-7
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