I just saw a piece of video on late-night ABC TV news, that ran with no other explanation than “here’s some video of a massive antarctic iceberg.” And it was HUGE. I mean, we’re talking about something the size of Vermont.
I’ve seen some cool satellite pictures of past super-icebergs, but I searched and searched all over the web and couldn’t find anything about current iceberg activity. Anyone know where to find out the facts on this?
Try a Google search – I did “current icebergs”.
Try either of these for example:
http://www.globalchange.org/current.htm
http://www.marineweather.com/cf/list1.cfm?CategoryID=86
Hope this helps.
Thanks for your suggestions, but I had no luck at either of those sites. I did try Google and gave up after inspecting about 50 or 60 sites. It appears that the main site that tracks these super-bergs hasn’t been updated since Oct 2000. Any search involving “current” is either going to pull up info that WAS current at the time, or has references to ocean currents. Google really needs a way to search with dates. I just want pages from 2001.
There was some interesting general info at the globalchange site, they say that the antarctic ice shelves are breaking up due to global warming. But there’s no specific info on icebergs.
Howdy Chas. I found the background story you were looking for at abcnews.com.
With that info- that the name of the shelf that launched the berg is the ‘Ross Ice Shelf’- I cut and pasted the name into Ixquick and got quite a few hits.
One here and another here. All told, more than a few places to get started.
An interesting story that the media seems to be dismissing.
Hope this helps.
Thanks Chris, but this ABCnews story doesn’t appear to be the current super-iceberg, those stories date back to March of last year. And the wisc.edu site hasn’t been updated in months.
It really isn’t clear to me whether this super-berg is the same one from March or October, or whether this is a new one. I think those were from a different area of antarctica.
I’m still hunting, but no good info so far… I guess the media is more interested in the woman doctor who got breast cancer while stuck in antarctica, than the impending doom of the human race due to global warming.
Well if that doesn’t chap my ass.
Here I am searching around the International Ice center site, the Defense Department site, the U.S. Naval site, NOAA, anything I can think of.
All I had to do was check out USA Today.
What’s happening to this world?
does anybody remember the proposals that were made about TOWING these massive shelf-ice bergs to desrt countrys for fresh water? As I recall, it was seriously proposed that a fleet of ocean-going tugs be employed to tow such a berg to either the coast of saudi arabia, or peru. The ice could then be converted into frewsh water for irrigation and human consumption-orin the case of Saudi arabia, it could be used to water a golf course.
These proposals seem to have come to nought-although i recall that even given the melting along the way, enough ice would survive a 10,000 - mile tow, to make the project worthwhile!
Yeah, but how many tugs would you need to tow something the size of Vermont? I have visions of tow-cable attachment-fixtures slowly migrating towards the front of the berg as the ice flows around them under the intense towing pressure. Maybe the berg could be pushed…
Just for the record, 100 miles x 30 miles is not the size (that is, “area”) of Vermont. (VT has over three times the area of the burg.)
It is larger than Delaware, smaller than Connecticut.
Since it is 150 feet high at the edges, and ninety percent is below water, you end up with 3,915,880,000,000 tons of ice (give or take a few billion).
Push it? Sure, push all you want. Four trillion tons of water is not gonna move all that fast. Now figure out the effects of currents, and winds. Push harder. Don’t break it up, though.
Yep, it looks like that is the one, even though it appears this berg broke off sometime late last year. I found out why this is a current news item, the tagging you refer to was just in a big press release this week from the National Science Foundation, which apparently has not just tagged the berg, but set up a camp on the berg as well. Thanks for the info.
And hey, Chris, I feel exactly the way you do, I searched all the hardcore science places too, and then it turns up in USAToday, what IS the world coming to? Is USA Today actually becoming a respectable source of science news? Is an American mass-media publisher actually printing stories about global warming? I can’t believe it!
You’re talking about the biggest icebergs, which are chunks of the Ross Ice Shelf which have broken free. Methinks they were thinking of towing smaller ones to Saudi - maybe Manhattan sized or less.