The Larsen-C glacier is offshore, most of its ice creeps along the seabed, slowly pushed by younger layers of ice pushing behind. For any ice shelf, this journey of ice masses ends the same way - sooner or later the end of the stream is completely afloat and breaks off. A new iceberg is born.
A specific feature of shelf icebergs is a flat and almost horizontal upper surface. Probably the lower one too, but scientists haven’t gotten there yet. In essence, this is an ice floe, only very large and thick - of the order of hundreds of meters or even more.
If the coast is straight and the depth grows evenly, then the iceberg will most likely break off in a straight line. And the next one, too, having received two almost parallel faces. But the mechanism of formation of two lateral faces perpendicular to them is unclear and needs to be explained.
The length of the ice floe is likely to exceed one nautical mile (1.852 km). By local standards, this is quite a bit. Not so long ago, we wrote about the wanderings of an iceberg the size of Jamaica, breaking away from the same Larsen-S glacier.
By the way, this glacier is now the last of the three grandiose glaciers of the Weddell Sea. Larsen-A and Larsen-B have already been destroyed as a result of global warming, threatening, among other things, an increase in sea level from the melting of polar ice.
IceBridge mission is a NASA project dedicated to monitoring the state of polar ice in the Arctic and Antarctic.
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