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New Iceberg Is Bigger Than Delaware
The biggest iceberg seen since 1987 broke away from Antarctica in October, 1998, but most of the Antarctic ice sheet seems stable, scientists said.
Start Date: 12/05/98
[This text quotes stories from the Associated Press and Reuters, dated October 15-16, 1998.]
A giant iceberg, bigger than the state of Delaware, has broken off an Antarctic ice shelf. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said [Oct 15, 1998] that the berg, named A-38, broke off the Ronne Ice Shelf and is floating adjacent to the shelf.
The iceberg is 92 miles long and about 30 miles wide with an area of 2,751 square miles. Delaware has an area of 2,044 square miles.
Ice shelves are massive, floating sheets of snow and frozen water that circle Antarctica. Some scientists believe that the breaking off, or calving, of icebergs may be an indicator of global warming. The last known iceberg of this size to calve off a Southern Hemisphere Ice Shelf was B-9 in the Ross Sea in October 1987.
However, a team of British, Dutch and American scientists from University College London reported [Oct 15, 1998] that most of the ice stored in Antarctica was very stable and it did not appear to be contributing to rising sea levels.
"The icy continent now looks an unlikely source of rising global sea level this century, making thermal expansion of the ocean due to global warming, and the shrinking of mountain glaciers, more likely causes," Professor Duncan Wingham, leader of the scientific research team, said.
He said the world's oceans were rising at such a rate that millions of homes near sea level could be underwater in two centuries if current predictions were correct.
The scientists from University College are planning to study ice core samples from the Ronne Ice Shelf to learn more about it and why the iceberg broke off, NOAA said.
 Excelsior, Michael Lindemann's new novel (written under the pen name Michael Paul), depicts a wholly plausible near future in which human cloning is both widespread and widely abused; terrorists have access to target-specific biological weapons; recreational space travel is commonplace; and mounting pressures of global climate change, environmental decline, population growth and civil unrest inspire radical new approaches to urban security.
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