World's biggest iceberg drifts towards Antarctic penguin island

The Manila Times

World's biggest iceberg drifts towards Antarctic penguin island  The world's biggest iceberg -- more than twice the size of London -- could drift towards a remote island where scientist Andrew Meijers warns it risks disrupting feeding for baby penguins and seals. The gigantic wall of ice is moving slowly from Antarctica on a potential collision course with South Georgia, a crucial wildlife breeding ground in the South Atlantic.  AFP VIDEO  Subscribe to The Manila Times Channel - https://tmt.ph/YTSubscribe   Visit our website at https://www.manilatimes.net   Follow us:  Facebook - https://tmt.ph/facebook  Instagram - https://tmt.ph/instagram  Twitter - https://tmt.ph/twitter  DailyMotion - https://tmt.ph/dailymotion   Subscribe to our Digital Edition - https://tmt.ph/digital   Check out our Podcasts:  Spotify - https://tmt.ph/spotify  Apple Podcasts - https://tmt.ph/applepodcasts  Amazon Music - https://tmt.ph/amazonmusic  Deezer: https://tmt.ph/deezer  Tune In: https://tmt.ph/tunein  #TheManilaTimes #worldnews  #iceberg  #antartica

Transcript

00:00So it's the biggest iceberg in the world at the moment. It was around 4,000 square kilometres

00:05last year, but it's been melting ever since and so it's down to about three and a half thousand,

00:09but that's still more than bigger than any other bergs in the world. And they're quite rare. So

00:14megabergs of this scale do come loose, particularly from the Weddell Sea, but on the scale of a fewer

00:19decade. So I was on the Sir David Attenborough when we encountered it back in 2023 and it's

00:25amazingly impressive. It's a 40 metre high wall of ice stretching from one horizon to the other.

00:30It's actually really hard to get an impression of just how big it is, but it's a phenomenal

00:34thing to see. And at the moment it's sitting in one of these jets and meandering its way towards

00:38South Georgia. So it's taking a sort of a circuitous path, but the jet will take it to

00:43the island in the next three to four weeks. It is melting and when these icebergs melt,

00:49they eventually fracture into many, many smaller bergs and at that point melt relatively quickly.

00:53If it does ground, it could be conceivably be quite a problem for the breeding seals and penguins

00:59that live on the southern side of South Georgia, simply because it'll be in their way on their paths

01:04to their feeding areas, which means there could be an increase in mortality for chicks and pups,

01:09which are currently being fed by their parents. We've had around three of these bergs in the last

01:13five years and prior to that, maybe one or two a decade. So it's not a particularly common occurrence.

01:19It is a natural phenomenon, but what we do know is that the Antarctic ice shelves are melting.

01:24Since 2020, over six trillion tons of ice has been lost from the Antarctic ice shelves. This

01:31iceberg is roughly a trillion tons of freshwater, which can have a really significant local effect

01:36on both the oceanography, the physics, and the biology and biogeochemistry. On a larger scale

01:42though, we know that the melting of the Antarctic ice shelves is basically allowing more of the ice

01:47on the Antarctic continent to flow into the ocean, which increases sea level. So the biggest

01:52uncertainty for future sea level is really what the Antarctic will do. Pretty impossible to give

01:56a definitive answer as if an individual event is climate change related, but what we do see is the

02:01amount of ice increasing since we've been monitoring it, the amount of ice loss that is.

02:05I think these icebergs really act as like a microcosm of the wider southern ocean and it

02:10allows us to study things like the biological carbon pump, so the drawdown of carbon from the

02:15atmosphere into the ocean by biology. These icebergs act to stimulate phytoplankton blooms

02:21as well, so they can be really exciting laboratories for our scientists.

02:45you

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