An iceberg holding twice as much water as Lake Erie has broken off from Antarctica. The world’s biggest ice cube weighs a trillion metric tons and has a surface area the size of Delaware.
It sounds scary, but it’s not as terrifying as it sounds. The mass of ice was always floating—it’s the freely floating element that’s new. The iceberg jettisoned off the Larsen C ice shelf, a layer of ice atop the Weddell Sea that ranges in thickness from 200 meters to 600 meters. Scientists will continue to study the area for signs of further collapse.
