Massive Antarctic iceberg a quarter of the size of Wales set to emerge

A giant iceberg that is a quarter of the size of Wales looks set to emerge after a crack in an Antarctic ice shelf continued to spread.

The fissure in the Larsen C Ice Shelf has grown a further 10km since January 1, say researchers, and now extends for some 175 km.

If it grows just another 20km further, an iceberg one quarter the size of Wales will emerge, say a team of scientists at Swansea and Aberystwyth universities, and the British Antarctic Survey.

It will also make it one of the largest ever recorded icebergs.

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The team are able to track the emerging iceberg, which is some 5,000 sq km, thanks to Europe’s Sentinel-1 satellite system.

It is still not known when the iceberg will break off.

“The rift tip has just entered a new area of softer ice, which will slow its progress,” Professor Adrian Luckman from Swansea University told the BBC.

“Although you might expect any extension to hasten the point of calving, it actually remains impossible to predict when it will break because the fracture process is so complex.

“My feeling is that this new development suggests something will happen within weeks to months, but there is an outside chance that further growth will be slow for longer than that.

“Sometimes rift growth is triggered by ocean swell originating elsewhere, which is also hard to predict.”