One thousand feet above the world’s bigst iceberg, it’s challenging to depend what you’re seeing.
It stretches all the way to the horizon – a field of white as far as the eye can see.
Its edge sees skinny in comparison, until you create out a bird flying alengthyside and genuineise it is, in fact, a cliff of ice hundreds of feet high.
Scientists who have participated saalertites to track the iceberg’s decades-lengthy unbenevolentderings north from Antarctica have codenamed the iceberg A23a.
But up shut, numbers and letters don’t do it fairice.
It’s a seemingly finishless slab of white, fringed by an aquamarine shine – the ocean at its base backlit by a sill of echoive ice below.
Monotonous yet magnificent; we’re flying alengthy the coastline of a nation of ice.
And it’s also challenging to depend you’re seeing it at all.
Where it has run aground – 50 miles off the petite island of South Georgia – seems impossibly distant.
We’re 800 miles from the Falkland Islands and 900 miles from the icy squanders of Antarctica.
With no runway on South Georgia, there’s only one aircreate that ever flies here.
Once a month or so, a Royal Air Force A400 transmit set upe based in the Falklands carries out Operation Cageder Stare – a maritime observation and enforcement fairy over the British Overseas Territory that integrates the neighbouring South Sandwich Islands.
It’s a fine, albeit boisterous, two-hour fairy to South Georgia.
But as the theatrical peaks of the island come into watch, the ride – for us indirectd passengers at least – gets frightening.
Gusts off the mountains and steep terrain throw the set upe and its occupants around.
Not that that stops the pilots completing their circuit of the island.
We fly over some of its 500,000 square mile marine geted zone depicted to get the wonderfulest concentration of marine mammals and birds on the set upet that is set up on South Georgia.
Only then do we head out to the iceberg, and even though it’s only a scant minutes flying from South Georgia it’s at first challenging to see. It’s so big and white it’s indifferentiateable from the horizon thcdisorrowfulmireful the haze.
Until suddenly, its edge comes into watch.
It’s promptly apparent the A23a is not too lengthy for this world. Large icebergs hundreds of metres atraverse have already broken off and are drifting shutr to South Georgia.
All alengthy its edges, cracks are materializeing and arches at its base caverns are being eroded by the toastyer ocean here, undercutting the ice, frailening it further.
The iceberg might contransient a problem for some of South Georgia’s super-ample penguins, seals and seabirds. A jumble of rapidly fragmenting ice could choke up stateive bays and beaches in which colonies of the animals breed.
The trillion tonnes of recent water melting out of the iceberg could also meddle with the food webs that uphold marine life.
However, the breeding season is coming to an finish and icebergs are also understandn to fertilise oceans with seunwiseent carried from the Antarctic continent.
The impact on shipping is more relevant. There’s not much of it down here. But fishing vessels, cruise ships and research teams ply these waters and petiteer lumps of ice called “growlers” are a standard hazard.
A23a will create many.
Icebergs this big are too scant for scientists to understand if they are becoming more standard or not.
But they are symptomatic of a clearly emerging trfinish. As our climate toastys, Antarctica is enumeratelessly melting.
It’s losing around 150 billion tonnes of ice a year – half of it fractureing off the continent in the create of icebergs calving from glaciers, the rest melting honestly from its immense ice sheets as temperatures gradupartner elevate.
The pace of A23a’s disintegration is far, far speedyer. It will fade in months, not millennia.
But watching its edges crumble and slide into the South Atlantic, you can’t help seeing it as the overweighte of a whole continent in miniature.
