Iceberg the size of Malta breaks up

The Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica has recently spawned ice over 300 square kilometers (116 square miles) in size. About the size of Malta, the iceberg broke sharply into many pieces.

Images taken on Copernicus Sentinel satellite missions last year showed two major glacial movements. The animation above uses 57 radar images captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission between February 2019 and February 2020 and shows how the cracks grew and as a result of the calf event. The last framework is from February 10, 2020.

The pine Island glacier, along with its neighbor Thwaites glacier, connects the middle of the West Antarctic ice sheet with the ocean – both of which spread large amounts of ice into the ocean. Both of these glaciers have been losing ice over the last 25 years.

Since the early 1990s, the ice speed of the Pine Island Glacier has skyrocketed to values ​​in excess of 10 meters per day. The floating ice face, which has an average thickness of about 500 meters, has undergone a series of calving events over the past 30 years, some of which have abruptly changed the shape and position of the sea. face ice.

These changes were mapped by satellites built by the European Space Agency since the 1990s, with calf events occurring in 1992, 1995, 2001, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2018 , and now 2020.