Suddl
Well, you have to admit one thing that watching the ice cubes melt away slowly in your drink in hot weather is really mind-calming thing. As kids, most of us had one stage quirk of scraping the ice off of the back of the freezer’s wall or to take out ice cubes from ice trays and put them in hot water as they slowly melt. The ice would start to let by having first little cracks formed inside the ice due to sudden temperature change.
But what you might be shocked to know that something like this is happening on a gigantic scale as well. As it happens to be a really huge ice cube is getting dumped inside the ocean.
From the Amery Ice Shelf located in Antarctica, a huge iceberg simply broke off on 28th September of 2019. This block of broken ice is named as D28 or the Loose Tooth. This ice block has an area of nearly 1,582km² and approximately weighs 315 billion tonnes.
If you still do not get the perspective then hear this; it is bigger than the entirety of the Faeroe Island Archipelago or bigger than the entire city of Bangkok. Talk about your icebreaker: literally!
The breaking of the arctic ice is known as Calving and is the natural process during which the ice shelf starts to lose chunks of its glaciers, in order for it to balance the amount of snow that it is collecting upstream.
The breakage of the loose Tooth was predicted by the scientists many years ago and they have been monitoring its progress too. Prof Helen Fricker working at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography stated that this event is not the one that sin caused by the climatic changes as per the records of satellite images. These images show an environmental balance in and around the Amery Ice Shelf.
Still, the Amery Ice Shelf is the center for another huge calving event in the past. Back during the years 1962 to 1963, a massive chunk of ice with an area of 9,000km², which is 6 times the size of the Loose Tooth, broke off from the Ice Shelf and then drifted slowly into the ocean.
Calving is not something triggered by the climatic changes; instead, it is a common natural occurrence. Due to this event, an estimated 40000 icebergs of small to medium sizes have broken off from Greenland. Still, none of those thousands of icebergs can match up to the behemoth of an iceberg that is Loose Tooth.
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