World’s biggest iceberg gets stuck after 40-year journey from Antarctica

London: The world’s biggest iceberg, drifting from Antarctica towards South Georgia island since 2020, has stuck 73 km from a remote Antarctic island, The Guardian reported citing a research organisation.

Iceberg A23a, measuring about 3,300 sq km and weighing almost 1tn tonnes, raised fears about colliding with the island or running aground near it in shallow waters, causing difficulty to penguins and seals to feed their young.

As the possibility of iceberg remaining stuck there is not known, Andrew Meijers, an oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said that it would be interesting to see what would become of it.

Meijers added that the iceberg remaining stuck there since 1 March will not ‘significantly affect the local wildlife’ if it continues to be grounded there.

Having tracked the iceberg via satellite since late 2023, Meijers said that ‘In the last few decades, the many icebergs that end up taking this route through the Southern Ocean soon break up, disperse and melt.’

After calving from the Antarctic shelf in 1986, the world’s biggest and oldest iceberg continued to be stuck and finally broke free in 2020 before starting its journey north.

Though a 19km-long chunk broke off in January, the satellite images previously showed that it was not crumbling into smaller pieces while traveling the path icebergs take.

The iceberg raised concerns about affecting wildlife breeding ground of South Georgia with animals like penguins and seals to having to travel further to get around the huge iceberg.

‘This could reduce the amount of food coming back to pups and chicks on the island, and so increase mortality,’ Meijers was quoted as saying.

A rise in the temperature to ‘between 1.5 and 2.0 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels’ could lead to melting frozen water causing oceans to swell by a dozen metres, researchers warned last month.