An iceberg the size of five Manhattans just broke off the massive Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica. This iceberg is the 6th largest to break from the glacier’s ice shelf since 2011.
Since spotting the crack in early October, Lhermitte had guessed that the icebergs would take weeks or months to calf, "but it turned out to be on the quick side," he told Live Science. [Photo Gallery: Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier Cracks]
At 115 square miles (300 square kilometers), the enormous amount of ice that calved off the glacier's ice shelf is even larger than the mass that broke off last year, Lhermitte said.
However, the newborn iceberg didn't stay in one piece for long. Within a day, it had splintered into smaller pieces, with the largest piece measuring a substantial 87 square miles (226 square km) before it later broke apart even more, Lhermitte said.
One of the most disturbing trends with Pine Island Glacier is that the deep subsurface rifts in the ice shelf now appear to be forming in the center of the shelf instead of along the margins where breaks have occurred in the past.
x#sentinel1 shows the rapid evolution from a rift across Pine Island Glacier in September to the calving of ~300km² of icebergs end of October, where the largest iceberg (226km²) will be named B-46 by NIC @CopernicusEU 1/2 pic.twitter.com/kQ7QyE6I7h
— Stef Lhermitte (@StefLhermitte) October 30, 2018The new iceberg was to be named B-46 by the U.S. National Ice Center, but it never happened as the iceberg shattered after calving. The splintering of a calved iceberg is a relatively new phenomenon as the ice platform crumbles. Previously, these icebergs would stay intact until moving out of the Amundsen Sea and into the open ocean.
Just look at this jaw-dropping retreat. Wow!
xComparison of the 2018 Pine Island Glacier calving front with historical 1973-2011 data by @JoeMacGregor shows how much PIG has retreated from the 1973-2013 range. pic.twitter.com/ifxmk85hMo
— Stef Lhermitte (@StefLhermitte) October 30, 2018