Splitting Iceberg Spotted from Space
17.03.2008 - Other
On March 4th, 2008, C-CORE, a Canadian ice-tracking service which is part of the Polar View consortium, captured the break up of a massive iceberg that had calved off of the Larsen B ice shelf in late April 2005 and had drifted its way into the warmer waters of the southern Atlantic Ocean. The break up of the iceberg, known as A53A, took place off of South Georgia Island.
A few days earlier, on March 1st, C-CORE had noticed a north-south fissure in the iceberg while studying satellite images from Envisat's Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) instrument. The radar image indicated that A53A was unstable and likely to split. Then on March 4th, Envisat's Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) sensor captured the iceberg breaking up. The two icebergs that resulted are estimated to be around 30 km in length. The relative warmth of the waters in which A53A split makes it very likely that several smaller icebergs also formed.
Since 2006, the European Space Agency has supported Polar View, a satellite remote-sensing programme under the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security info (GMES) Service Element (GSE), which focuses on the Polar Regions.
