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In the first image, the advancing rift tip’s position is indicated by the northern red arrow relative to the one just north of Gipps Ice Rise, a bedrock knob above sea level. The completion of the rift was captured on July 11 by VIIRS thermal imagery and is shown on July 12th. The brighter, whiter, warmer ocean water in the rift contrasts strongly with the darker, colder ice shelf or iceberg surface in the TIRS/VIIRS composite image. Due to a strong storm in the Weddell Sea at the time of the calving, the >1 trillion ton iceberg’s motion led to a collision that produced the smaller A-68B iceberg by July 14 th at the northern end of A-68. Although this large calving event is not itself evidence of climate change in this part of the Antarctic Peninsula, an even larger iceberg was calved in 1986, it does mean that the Larsen C’s ice shelf’s front is now as far landward as it has ever been in the history of human observations in this area.

Credit: Christopher A. Shuman, University of Maryland, Baltimore County,
at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory, Greenbelt, MD USA

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