Reply #9: update

[indigobusiness]

Huge iceberg to ram glacier

'Clash of the titans' in the Antarctic


A 100-mile-long iceberg is steaming towards a floating glacier near the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica. NASA scientists have been following the impending smash-up in satellite images and have predicted the collision will occur no later than Jan. 15.

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"It's a clash of the titans, a radical and uncommon event," said Robert Bindshadler, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

With an area of 1,200-square miles (3,000-square kilometers), the iceberg B-15A is about the size of Long Island, NY. If it stays on its present course, it will smack bumpers with the Drygalski Ice Tongue, which is a thick frozen chunk that juts out into the Ross Sea from a land-based glacier on the western Pacific coast of Antarctica.

"Even a ‘tap’ from a giant can be powerful," Bindshadler said. “It will certainly be a blow far larger than anything else the ice tongue has ever experienced.”

The McMurdo Research Station, located in McMurdo Sound on the Ross Sea, is the hub of U.S. scientific work on Antarctica. In the summer months, ships unload supplies at the station for airlift to researchers at the geographic South Pole, 800 miles inland.

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