World’s largest glacier could be on collision course with Antarctic penguin island: “Game of Thrones”

The world’s largest glacier – three times the size of New York City – could be headed for a remote island, a scientist has warned, disrupting the feeding of baby penguins and seals.

The giant wall of ice is moving. Slowly from Antarctica On a possible collision course with South Georgia, a An important wildlife breeding ground In the South Atlantic.

Satellite images suggest that unlike previous “megabergs”, this one is not disintegrating into smaller pieces as it passes through the Southern Ocean, British Antarctic Survey physical oceanographer Andrew Meyers told AFP on Friday.

While it is difficult to predict the exact course, current currents suggest that Colossus will reach the shallow continental shelf around South Georgia in two to four weeks.

But what happens next is anyone’s guess, he said.

It could move away from the shelf and into open waters beyond South Georgia, a British overseas territory about 870 miles east of the Falkland Islands.

Or it could hit a loose bottom and stick around or disintegrate for months.

Meijers said this could seriously hamper seals and penguins trying to feed and raise their young on the island. of Island hosts 1.3 million pairs of chinstrap penguins – one of the world’s largest colonies – about 5 million seals and 65 million breeding birds.

“Icebergs had crashed on the same land earlier and that caused massive mortality for the penguins by sealing the chicks and pups,” he said.

At approximately 1,550 square miles, it is known as the world’s largest and oldest glacier A23aBorn in 1986 off the Antarctic shelf. Before its birth in 1986, the giant glacier hosted a Soviet research station. falley

It was stuck for more than 30 years before it was finally freed in 2020, with the log’s journey north sometimes delayed by ocean forces causing it to spin. By 2023, the British Antarctic Survey a Outdated satellite imagesIt shows the movement of glaciers.

“Game of Thrones-esque” glaciers

In the year Meijers, who came face-to-face with the glacier while leading a scientific mission in late 2023 — described it as “a huge white cliff stretching from horizon to horizon, 40 to 50 meters high.”

Referring to the Dark Fantasy series, “It’s like this white wall. It’s very Game of Thrones-esque, really.

The A23a followed the same route as the previous giant glaciers, passing through the Weddell Sea on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula in a so-called “Ice Lake”. It is the same current that famous explorer Ernest Shackleton used to escape from Antarctica in 1916. fairy tale Shipwreck found Off the coast of Antarctica in 2022.

Weighing just under a trillion tons, this freshwater monster was buffeted by the world’s most powerful ocean “jet stream” — the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

Raul Cordero, part of the National Antarctic Research Committee at the University of Santiago in Chile, said he was confident the glacier would push South Georgia aside.

“The island acts as a barrier to ocean currents, so it usually diverts the water long before it reaches the island,” he said.

“The iceberg is moving with that water flow, so the chances of it hitting are not that great,” he said, though it looks like a piece.

Another scientist, glaciologist Soledad Tiranti, currently on an Argentinian expedition to the Antarctic, said glaciers like A23A “are so deep that they generally stick to the sea floor before reaching an island or a mainland.”

It’s summer in South Georgia and the penguins and seals that live on the south coast are feeding in the icy waters to fatten up their young.

“If the snow park stops there, they’re either going to be physically closed off where they’re eating, or they’re going to have to go around it,” Meyers said.

“That burns a lot more energy for them, so that’s less energy for the puppies and chicks, which leads to increased mortality.”

South Georgia’s seal and penguin populations are having a “bad season” with bird flu, he said, “and that (snow) makes it worse.”

When A23a eventually melts, it could seed the water with nutrients that promote phytoplankton growth, feed whales and other species, and allow scientists to study how such blooms absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

While glaciers are a natural phenomenon, Meijers said the rate at which they are disappearing from Antarctica is increasing, possibly due to human-induced climate change.

In January 2023, a giant chunk of Antarctica’s Brunt Ice Shelf – A piece the size of two New York cities – Freed. The Brunt Ice Shelf is located across the Weddell Sea from the Larsen C Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula. In the year By 2022, the Larsen C ice shelf — roughly the size of New York City and long thought to be stable — He fell into the sea.