Skip to playerSkip to main contentSkip to footer
  • 7/9/2025
When massive icebergs break loose from places like Antarctica it can send tons of ice floating elsewhere, and it’s one of the most illustrative signs of global warming. Well, experts say exactly one of these calving events has happened again, the third such event in just the last 4 years.

Category

📚
Learning
Transcript
00:00When massive icebergs break loose from places like Antarctica, it can send tons of ice floating
00:08elsewhere, and it's one of the most illustrative signs of global warming. Well, experts say one
00:14of these calving events has happened again, the third such event in just the last four years.
00:19The iceberg broke loose on May 20th, captured in this image by the Copernicus Sentinel-1
00:23satellite. The giant iceberg has now been named A83, and you can see it breaking free,
00:29and it's utterly massive. Experts say this chunk of ice is around 147 square miles an area,
00:35or nearly seven times the size of Manhattan in New York. This and other calving events like it
00:41reveal a weakening of ice in Antarctica, caused by increasing temperatures at our poles.
00:46The effects of global warming tend to be more extreme in the coldest areas of the planet,
00:50with temperatures going up faster at the poles than anywhere else. Calving events like this
00:55are of particular import to climate scientists as well. When giant ice sheets break loose,
00:59they not only indicate warming oceans, but these sheets also melt faster as a result,
01:04raising sea levels and acidifying our planet's waters at a quicker rate. This also exposes a
01:09greater area of the ocean water to solar radiation, exacerbating the problem even further.

Recommended