The largest iceberg in the world moves again after more than 30 years stranded

The largest iceberg in the world is on the move again after having spent more than 30 years stranded at the bottom of the ocean, as reported by the BBC this Friday. The iceberg, called A23a, measuring 4,000 square kilometers, separated from the Antarctic coast in 1986, but settled in the Weddell Sea, becoming like an 'ice island'.

Over the past year, experts have observed that it has been drifting rapidly and is now on the verge of breaching Antarctic waters. A23a was formed following a huge break in the Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986, when it housed a now dismantled Soviet scientific research base on its surface.

Because right now?

Expert Andrew Fleming, from the British Antarctic Survey, tells the BBC that he himself asked a couple of colleagues if there could have been some temperature change in the waters that would have caused it to move again after 20 years, “but the consensus was that the time had simply come.”

“It had been stranded since 1986 but over time it was going to lose enough size to lose grip and start moving. “We detected the first movement in 2020,” he explained. In recent months, A23a has been pushed by winds and currents and is now passing through the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Like most icebergs in the Weddell sector, A23a will almost certainly be ejected into the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which will throw it into the South Atlantic on a path that has become a kind of “iceberg alley.”

Scientists will closely monitor the progress of A23a, since if it runs aground in southern Georgia it could cause problems for the millions of seals, penguins and other seabirds that inhabit the island, since its large size would disrupt these species.