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World's Largest Iceberg Breaks Into Smaller Pieces The B-15A iceberg	By Tudor Raiciu, Technology and Science Editor 7th of November 2005, 20:44 GMT Adjust text size:


After five years of being the world's largest free-floating object, the B-15A iceberg has broken into smaller pieces off Antarctica's Cape Adare. ESA's Envisat satellite's Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) is sensitive to ice, and has been tracking the movement of the drifting ice object continuously since the beginning of this year. Its latest imagery reveals the bottle-shaped iceberg split into nine knife-shaped icebergs and a myriad of smaller pieces on 27-28 October, the largest being formed by fractures along the long axis of the original single iceberg. Measuring, until last week, around 115 kilometres in length with an area exceeding 2500 square kilometres, the B-15A tabular iceberg had apparently run aground off Cape Adare, the northernmost corner of the Victoria Land Coast. This stranding appears to have led to flexing and straining which resulted in the break-up. "The long knife-shaped pieces suggest the iceberg has split along existing lines of weakness within the iceberg", says Mark Drinkwater of ESA's Ocean and Ice Unit. "These would have been pre-existing fractures and crevasses in the ice shelf." These new icebergs, named by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Ice Center, will retain their parent's title: the three largest island-sized pieces have been called B-15M, B-15N and B-15P. B-15A was the largest remaining section of the even larger B-15 iceberg that calved from the nearby Ross Ice Shelf in March 2000 before breaking up into smaller sections off McMurdo Island.

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