The world’s largest and oldest iceberg has run aground near a remote island in the southern Atlantic Ocean.
The iceberg, called A23a, has run aground at South Georgia, a British island territory with no permanent residents.
A23a split off an Antarctic ice shelf in 1986 but stayed moored into the seabed in the Weddell Sea for more than 30 years. It began drifting toward South Georgia in 2020, the British Antarctic Survey said in a release.
The iceberg’s drift toward South Georgia was delayed from April until December last year after it got stuck in a vortex spinning around an underwater mountain, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
Now that it is grounded, A23a is expected to slowly melt and break up due to the relatively warmer waters near South Georgia and pressure from the waves and tides. It is currently stuck nearly 56 miles from the island.
As of August 2024, A23a weighed 1.1 trillion tons and spanned 1,418 square miles, smaller than Rhode Island but more than twice the size of London, according to CNN.
South Georgia is home to colonies of penguins and seals.
“It is unlikely that South Georgia’s populations of seals and penguins are impacted by the iceberg. Potentially, it could interrupt their pathway to feeding sites and force the adults to expend more energy to travel around it. This could reduce the amount of food coming back to pups and chicks on the island, and so increase mortality,” BAS oceanographer Andrew Meijers said in the release.
The iceberg could also help provide more food to the island’s animals.
“It’s like dropping a nutrient bomb into the middle of an empty desert,” BAS marine ecologist Nadine Johnston told the BBC.
Creatures on the seafloor coming into contact with the iceberg are not so lucky.
“Their entire universe is being bulldozed by a massive slab of ice scraping along the seafloor,” BAS marine biogeographer Huw Griffiths told the BBC.
A23a may pose problems for fishermen in the southern Atlantic.
“Discussions with fishing operators suggests that past large bergs have made some regions more or less off limits for fishing operations for some time due to the number of smaller — yet often more dangerous — bergy bits,” Mr. Meijers said in the BAS release.
• Brad Matthews can be reached at bmatthews@washingtontimes.com.