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Gargantuan ice island heads by Labrador

Emma Graney
Published on July 4, 2011
Published on July 4, 2011
Emma Graney  RSS Feed

Could these be among the first published citizen images of the megabergs heading south towards Newfoundland?

Topics :
Canadian Ice Services , Greenland , Labrador , Charlottetown

Photographed last week about 50 miles off the south coast of Labrador by Cory Burt, the image shows an iceberg too big to fit in just one photo frame.

Mr. Burt, of Charlottetown, took the pictures onboard the Labrador Quest while fishing snow crab.

“The iceberg was right on our fishing grounds at the time and forced us to move several strings of gear,” he told the Pen.

He estimates the iceberg’s size at close to three miles long and over a mile wide.

“It’s by far the biggest iceberg I’ve ever seen,” he said.

“It looks like snowcovered land from a distance it’s so big.”

He snapped the pics on his iPod and says the berg was so big he couldn’t get it all in the one attempt.

According to the latest information from scientists, the Petermann Ice Island (PII), which calved away from Greenland in August last year, continues to slowly move southwards, all the time fracturing into smaller pieces.

The original PII was some 280 square kilometres in size, dwarfing a 28 square kilometre ice island that calved off from the same area in 2008.

When the megaberg first fractured in September, Canadian Ice Services (CIS) dropped a beacon on top of one of the resulting islands to track it via satellite.

At the time, the two ice islands — PII-B and PII-A — measured 160 square kilometres and 80 square kilometres respectively, but several groundings have caused both to disintegrate into a mass of smaller pieces.

According to CIS, in early April PII-A gathered momentum and for two days it was estimated to be travelling at between 13 and 22 nautical miles a day.

Unfortunately for scientists the beacon atop PII-A ceased transmission on June 3 at 5.08pm, but the larger pieces of the bergs are still being tracked by CIS using various satellite imagery.

PII-A fractured again on June 10.

That created a smaller 3.8 square kilometre piece, known as PII-A-a, but left PII-A at a gargantuan 58.5km in size.

A 10 square kilometre portion of the original PII-B was travelling far ahead of PII-A as it rounded the Labrador coast.

info@northernpen.ca

Comments

  • Username
    W McLean
    - July 5, 2011 at 02:20:12

    Amazing video here.... and this isn't even the largest of the ice islands! http://youtu.be/VReyKfti_38

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