Far underneath the ice shelves of the Antarctic, there’s more life than expected, finds a recent study in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, published this week. During an exploratory survey, researchers drilled through 900 m of ice in the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf, situated on the South-Eastern Weddell Sea.
A chasm and a crack on the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica are creeping closer and closer to one another, and when the two finally meet, a slab of ice twice the size of New York City will break away and float out to sea. The two glacial flaws are about 4km apart, and it could take days or months for them to finally rendezvous. But when they do, the iceberg that forms in the Weddell Sea will not be the largest to orbit Antarctica. In fact, it might not even make the historical top 20.