A Australian scientist named Neal Young said it is a natural event & not due to climate change. He captured the moment with his camera.
The iceberg is approximate 2545 square kilometers, approximate the size of Australian Capital Territory.
The crash of an iceberg against a glacier is a dramatic & unexpected event.
Neal Young said to BBC News, “It is a very active area for algae growth, especially in springtime. There are emperor penguin colonies about 200-300km away to the west. They come to this area to feed, and seals in the area also come to get access to the open water.”
Neal Young said, “iceberg B9B, which had broken off from another part of Antarctica in 1987, came by and “gave it a pretty big nudge.”
“There are some crazy things going down in Antarctica,” said Mark Serreze, director of the snow and ice data center.
The new iceberg is slightly smaller than the Hawaiian island of Oahu.
Researchers focused on a continent about 1 ½ times the size of the United States, on the western side of Antarctica. It may happened result of warmer temperatures there and especially the region’s shrinking peninsula.
NASA glaciologist Robert Bindschadler said, “It’s a good thing to be reminded that it’s not all about west Antarctica.”
Since the first measurement had taken 50 years back, the peninsula has lost about 8,000 square miles of ice till now.
Rob Massom, a senior scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Center in Hobart, Tasmania said, “Removal of this tongue of floating ice would reduce the size of that area of open water, which would slow down the rate of salinity input into the ocean and it could slow down this rate of Antarctic bottom water formation.”
He also said, “The calving itself hasn’t been directly linked to climate change but it is related to the natural processes occurring on the ice sheet,”
Benoit Legresy, a researcher with the LEGOS laboratory for geophysical studies in Toulouse, France said, ”It was a slow process.”
Scientists are tracking the influence of global warming on Antarctica. It is a too much complicated place than the Arctic. It regulates & make effects on the world’s weathers & change of climate.