The largest country in the world was born. It is nine times larger than Prague
The largest country in the world was born. It is nine times larger than Prague
The largest kra in the world was created. It’s a colossal piece of ice that has broken off from Antarctica.
The Kru in the Weddell Sea was captured by the European satellite Sentinel-1 (pictured). Experts from the European Space Agency (ESA) designated it as A-76 and determined its dimensions – the colossus is 170 kilometers and 25 kilometers wide. Its area covers 4320 square kilometers, which is close to the area of the Pardubice region and nine times exceeds the area of Prague. It is even larger than the island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean.
The largest circle so far was a piece of ice called the A-23A, which reached 3,880 square kilometers.
The new giant broke away from the shelf glacier named after Edith Ronne’s Arctic in western Antarctica. Such formation of ice is called “calving”.
“The ice floes in the area are part of natural cycles and unrelated to climate change,” Reuters quoted an expert on glaciers and ice floes from Ted Scambos University of Colorado as saying.
The Edith Ronne Glacier area has so far been spared an influx of hot water, which disrupts the natural cycle of “calving” and re-growth of glaciers in Antarctica.
A view of the Ronne Shelf Glacier from a spectral radiometer located on the Aqua satellite, owned by NASA. The film dates from the end of 2019, ie before the break-off of the ice floe. The glacier, named after the Edith Ronne Arctic, covers an area of 400,000 square kilometers. At its edge is a dark blue surface of the Weddell Sea. At the bottom of the image you can see the floating part of the glacier. | source:
Profimedia
Ted Scambos pointed out that the finger-like kra is unstable. It will soon fall apart into two or three pieces.
Viewed through physics, the ice shelf from which the kra “calved” was already floating on the water. The described “calving” therefore does not affect the sea level.
The names are created according to the area where they were first recorded. The letter means area, the number determines the order. If the kra breaks, additional letters are added to the end of the name.
And what the calving that creates ice floes looks like, the following video shows.