Huge Iceberg Poised to Break Off Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier

By Laura Geggel, Senior Writer | October 9, 2018 07:06am ET

A newly discovered long and craggy rift is splintering across West Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier, satellite images show.

The nearly 19-mile-long (30 kilometers) rift started in the middle of the ice shelf, where the ice shelf touches warmer ocean waters that are melting it from underneath, said Stef Lhermitte, an assistant professor in the Department of Geoscience and Remote Sensing at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

The rift only has about another 6 miles (10 km) to go before one or more icebergs calf, breaking off from the glacier, Lhermitte said. Another such event happened a mere year ago in 2017, when an iceberg 4.5 times the size of Manhattan broke off Pine Island Glacier. [Photo Gallery: Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier Cracks]

Lhermitte found the new crack by analyzing satellite images of the glacier, which he receives every day in his email inbox. "It was Wednesday evening [Oct. 3] and all of a sudden I saw something I didn't see the day before," he told Live Science.

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