Weddell Sea
| Use attributes for filter ! | |
| Area | 28 |
|---|---|
| Islands | James Ross |
| Berkner | |
| Laurie Island | |
| Coronation Island | |
| Powell Island | |
| Date of Reg. | |
| Date of Upd. | |
| ID | 2230304 |
About Weddell Sea
The Weddell Sea is part of the Southern Ocean and contains the Weddell Gyre. Its land boundaries are defined by the bay formed from the coasts of Coats Land and the Antarctic Peninsula. The easternmost point is Cape Norvegia at Princess Martha Coast, Queen Maud Land.
Sir David Attenborough polar ship has monster iceberg encounter
... But during the past year, currents and winds have driven the frozen block rapidly across the Weddell Sea...
A23a: World's biggest iceberg on the move after 30 years
... A23a, as it s called, calved from the Antarctic coastline in 1986, but almost immediately grounded in the Weddell Sea to become, essentially, an ice island...
Antarctica sea-ice hits new record low
... Only the Weddell Sea remains dominated by frozen floes...
Endurance: 'Finest wooden shipwreck I've ever seen'
...Endurance, the lost ship of Anglo-Irish explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, has finally been identified on the floor of Antarctica s Weddell Sea...
Shackleton's Endurance: The impossible search for the greatest shipwreck
... The frozen floes that squeezed, snapped and then swallowed his polar steam yacht in the Weddell Sea between October and November 1915 smother its grave and protect it from discovery...
How a colossal block of ice became an obsession
... It s now entered the Weddell Sea which is directly south of the Atlantic Ocean...
Anyone ever Shackleton found lost the ship?
... This is the conclusion of scientists to find the, the endurance, which sank in 3,000 m of water in the Weddell Sea in 1915...
315 billion-tonne iceberg breaks off Antarctica
... This is roughly Amery to the Eastern Weddell Sea...
315 billion-tonne iceberg breaks off Antarctica
The EU's Sentinel-1 satellite System captured these before and after images
The Amery Ice Shelf in Antarctica has just produced its biggest iceberg in More Than 50 Years .
The calved block covers 1,636 sq km in area - a little smaller than Scotland's Isle of Skye - and is called D28.
The scale of the berg means it will have to be monitored and tracked because it could in future pose a hazard to shipping.
Not since the early 1960s has Amery calved a bigger iceberg. That was a whopping 9,000 sq km in area.
Amery is the third largest Ice Shelf in Antarctica, and is a key drainage channel for The East of The Continent .
The shelf is essentially the floating extension of A Number of glaciers That flow off The Land into The Sea . balancing the input of snow upstream.
So, scientists knew this calving event was coming. What's interesting is That much attention in the area had actually been focussed just to The East of the section That 's now broken away.
This is a segment of Amery That has because of its resemblance in satellite images to the dentition of a small child. Both ice areas had shared the same rift System .
Loose Tooth pictured in the early 2000s. D28 is seen forming to The LeftBut although wobbly, Loose Tooth is still attached. It's D28 That 's been extracted.
"It is the molar compared to a baby tooth," Prof Helen Fricker from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography told Bbc News .
That Loose Tooth would come off sometime between 2010 and 2015.
"I Am excited to see this calving event After All these years. We knew it would happen eventually, but just to keep us all on our toes, it is not exactly where we expected it to be," She Said .
The Scripps researcher stressed That there was no link between this event and Climate Change . Satellite data since the 1990s has shown That Amery is roughly in balance with its surroundings, despite experiencing strong surface melt in summer.
"While there is much to be concerned about in Antarctica, there is no cause for alarm yet for this particular Ice Shelf ," Prof Fricker added.
Amery experiences a lot of summer surface melt, but the data indicates it is in equilibriumThe Australian Antarctic Division will however be watching Amery closely to see if it reacts at all. The Division 's scientists have instrumentation in the region.
It's possible the loss of such a big berg will change the stress geometry across The Front of the Ice Shelf . This could influence the behaviour of cracks, and even the stability of Loose Tooth .
D28 is calculated to be about 210m thick and contains some 315 billion tonnes of ice.
The name comes from a classification System run by the US National Ice Center, which divides the Antarctic into quadrants.
The D quadrant covers the longitudes 90 degrees East to zero degrees, the Prime Meridian . This is roughly Amery to The Eastern Weddell Sea .
D28 is dwarfed by The Mighty A68 berg, which broke away from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in 2017. It currently covers an area More Than Three Times as big.
Nearshore currents and winds will carry D28 westwards. It's likely to take several years for it to break apart and melt completely.
Follow Jonathan
icebergs, earth science, earth observation, antarctic, climate change
Source of news: bbc.com
