Iceberg crash reshapes coastline of Antarctica

The world's largest iceberg has crashed into an Antarctic glacier, snapping off a five-kilometre chunk of the glacial outflow and reshaping the coastline of Antarctica.

The predicted "collision of the century" between the B15-A iceberg, which is the size of Luxembourg, and the 70-kilometre long Drygalski ice tongue had been expected at the beginning of the year. But the icy colossus became stranded a few kilometres from the tongue, starving penguins and blocking ships supplying food and fuel to Antarctic research stations.

Scientists believe the iceberg, which contains enough water to supply the River Nile for 80 years, became stranded on a sandbank.

Now the iceberg has finally scraped the side of the century-old ice tongue, an extension of the David glacier.

An image from the European Space Agency's Envisat shows a section of the ice tongue breaking off. Maps of the Antarctic will have to be redrawn. But the renegade ice giant may yet prove problematic.

"Since it touched, it's turned around quite dramatically from its original orientation," Mark Drinkwater, head of ESA's ocean and ice unit in the Netherlands told the NewScientist.

"The question now is whether the currents can get a hold of it and carry it out [to the open sea] without it getting lodged in the Terra Nova bay."

If the 115-km-long iceberg gets trapped in the bay it may interfere with penguins' feeding routes. It may also affect the flow of water from the bay.

B15-A is the largest remaining section of the large B15 iceberg which broke away from the Ross Ice Shelf in 2000. At that time, the iceberg was larger than Jamaica at 11,655 kilometres.

- INDEPENDENT