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The iceberg is 170 kilometers long and 25 kilometers wide
Photo: Copernicus Sentinel Data / ESA / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
An enormous iceberg has loosened at the South Pole, which is larger in area than the Spanish holiday island of Mallorca.
With around 4,320 square kilometers, the colossus is currently the largest iceberg in the world, reported the European space agency Esa, based in Paris.
The iceberg with the designation A-76 was discovered on current satellite images of the Copernicus Sentinel 1 mission.
Accordingly, he had separated on the western side of the Ronne Ice Shelf in the Weddell Sea in northwest Antarctica.
The Weddell Sea is the largest of the approximately 14 marginal seas of the Southern Ocean on the Antarctic continent.
Shrinking glaciers
In the Antarctic, huge ice masses break off regularly, experts also speak of calving. Due to climate change, however, there have been frequent ice breaks in recent years. The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the fastest warming regions on earth. On average, it is now almost three degrees warmer than it was 50 years ago. Almost 90 percent of the glaciers on the west coast of the peninsula have shrunk significantly in the past half century.
The names of the icebergs are traditionally made up of a letter for the area in Antarctica in which they were first sighted and a serial number.
With a length of around 170 kilometers and a width of 25 kilometers, the A-76 is much narrower than Mallorca, but longer - the area of the iceberg is therefore slightly larger than the island in the Mediterranean.
So far, the iceberg A-32A was currently the largest, it covers an area of around 3880 square kilometers and is also floating in the Weddell Sea.
The region is so remote that nobody would have noticed the iceberg breaking off.
As part of the so-called British research project »Antarctic Survey«, however, two ESA satellites also regularly fly over the area.
The new colossus has now been discovered on their recordings.
The icebergs are sometimes on the move for years before they melt.
At the end of last year, an iceberg drifted towards the British overseas territory of South Georgia and threatened to cut off entire penguin colonies from their feed stocks.
koe / dpa