The biggest iceberg on the planet has apparently been spinning in place for months — and that's very much not what it's supposed to do.
As the BBC reports, the ginormous iceberg, dubbed A23a, is supposed to be moving along Earth's most powerful current.
Instead, it's trapped atop a huge rotating column of water that oceanographers refer to as a "Taylor Column," named for the nobleman, physicist, and eventual Manhattan Project consultant GI Taylor who discovered such vortexes in the 1920s.
Measuring nearly 1,5000 square miles — or triple the size of New York City — A23a has been a source of fascination for scientists since it broke off from Antarctica's Filcher Ice Shelf back in 1986, only to get stuck to the ocean floor for decades.
In 2020, as the BBC notes, the iceberg "re-floated" and began to slowly drift again, and by last fall, A23a had all but made its departure out of Arctic waters.
In April of this year, the big boy was barreling full speed ahead when it reached the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), which moves more water than all the rivers on the planet combined and should have launched A23a even further along the outer edges of the Arctic and its eventual demise.
Instead, the iceberg got stuck north of the South Orkney Islands that sit on the edge of the Antarctic Peninsula and at the mouth of the Southern Ocean. In the intervening months, it's been spinning at about 15 degrees per day, and apparently, it won't melt and decay the way it's supposed to so long as it keeps up that spin.
Part of what's going on here seems to be the peculiarity of A23a to begin with, as Mark Brandon of England's Open University suggested to the BBC.
"Usually you think of icebergs as being transient things; they fragment and melt away. But not this one," the polar researcher said. "A23a is the iceberg that just refuses to die."
As the BBC reports, the ginormous iceberg, dubbed A23a, is supposed to be moving along Earth's most powerful current.
Instead, it's trapped atop a huge rotating column of water that oceanographers refer to as a "Taylor Column," named for the nobleman, physicist, and eventual Manhattan Project consultant GI Taylor who discovered such vortexes in the 1920s.
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| British Antarctic Survey |
Measuring nearly 1,5000 square miles — or triple the size of New York City — A23a has been a source of fascination for scientists since it broke off from Antarctica's Filcher Ice Shelf back in 1986, only to get stuck to the ocean floor for decades.
In 2020, as the BBC notes, the iceberg "re-floated" and began to slowly drift again, and by last fall, A23a had all but made its departure out of Arctic waters.
In April of this year, the big boy was barreling full speed ahead when it reached the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), which moves more water than all the rivers on the planet combined and should have launched A23a even further along the outer edges of the Arctic and its eventual demise.
Instead, the iceberg got stuck north of the South Orkney Islands that sit on the edge of the Antarctic Peninsula and at the mouth of the Southern Ocean. In the intervening months, it's been spinning at about 15 degrees per day, and apparently, it won't melt and decay the way it's supposed to so long as it keeps up that spin.
Part of what's going on here seems to be the peculiarity of A23a to begin with, as Mark Brandon of England's Open University suggested to the BBC.
"Usually you think of icebergs as being transient things; they fragment and melt away. But not this one," the polar researcher said. "A23a is the iceberg that just refuses to die."