Historically speaking, this is no big deal.
National Geographic reports:
The crevasse stretches 19 miles (30 kilometers) long and up to 260 feet (80 meters) wide, as shown in a picture taken by NASA’s Terra satellite in October and featured this week as a NASA Image of the Day.
Snaking across the floating tongue of the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica, the crack is expected to create an iceberg 350 square miles (907 square kilometers)—versus 303 square miles (785 square kilometers) for Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx combined, according to NASA.
As for when the iceberg might shove off, “that is very difficult to predict,” said oceanographer Eric Rignot of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “but in the coming months for sure”…
But as we reported in October 1998 when a Delaware-sized iceberg broke off Antarctica:
…we go to page 748 of the 1996 edition of The American Navigator, the prestigious Naval text updated continuously since 1799 (sometimes referred to as “The Bowditch.”)
The text reads “In 1854 and 1855, several ships in the South Atlantic reported a crescent-shaped iceberg with one horn 40 miles long, the other 60 miles long, and with an embayment 40 miles wide between the tips. In 1927 a berg 100 miles long, 100 miles wide, and 130 feet high above the water was reported. The largest iceberg ever reported was sighted in 1956 by the USS Glacier, a U. S. Navy icebreaker, about 150 miles west of Scott Island. This berg was 60 miles wide and 208 miles long, more than twice the size of Connecticut. Icebergs ten miles or more in length have been seen on many occasions in the Antarctic.”
So this spawning is hardly historic and won’t end the world.
This is smaller than New York CITY.
350 square miles is PUNY! There are several Texas ranches such as the 6666 Ranch that are larger. The King Ranch is 4 times larger.
Show me one as big as New York STATE, or even better, one the size of Texas, and I’ll believe there is something deserving attention.
Does the Titanic ring any bells?
bring it to texas, we need water there and also we can give jobs carving ice sculpters for the
restaurants. OBAMA AND MOOCHELLE ICE STATUES.WOULD BE A BIG SELL…
CALIFORNIA ALSO NEEDS WATER, I HOPE THE THERE IS ENOUGH TO SHARE OF THIS GLAZIER BECAUSE
MIKEL MOORE AND AL GORE WOULD ENJOY IT SUCKING ON IT…AND TAKE PICTURES WITH ZOO POLAR
ICE BEARS FOR THEIR NEW GLOBAL WARMING MOVIE…..
Bring on the martini’s, just add-shake and serve!!
There’s another one as big or bigger breaking off the Greenland ice sheet right now, coincidence? Does history mention this?
Does the iceberg have a gun?
Apologies to The Chimp Channel: “The asteroid is back. And this time, it
has a gun.”
It is so critical that before we react like “Chicken Little” to current news, we must look at history to gain a frame of reference. Most of the time we find that “what has never happened” has indeed “happened” many times.