Weird Square Iceberg Turns Out To Be Not As Weird As You'd Think

An odd rectangular iceberg recently broke
off the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica.

When you think of icebergs, you probably envision a jagged pile of ice sticking up from the water, with most of the iceberg still lurking underwater, ready to sink another ship like the Titanic.

This universal vision of icebergs is what recently made an Antarctic iceberg newsworthy.  It was a perfect rectangle. Flat on top, with straight vertical sides with sharp corners without any sign of imperfect geometry.  

According to LiveScience, the wonderfully rectangular gigantic piece of ice is called a tabular iceberg. LiveScience interviewed Kelly Brunt, an ice scientist with NASA and the University of Maryland.  Here's how she explained it.

Tabular icebergs like this one that made the news are always wide and flat and long, like a sheet cake. They split off from the edges of ice shelves, which are large blocks of ice connected toland but floating in the water surrounding places like Antarctica.  This particular iceberg came from the Larsen C ice shelf.

The Larsen C ice shelf made news last year, too, when an iceberg the size of Delaware broke awau from it. Many scientists saw this and the diminishing Larsen C ice shelf an ominous sign of global warming.

The recent rectangular iceberg isn't nearly as big as that giant Delaware sized one last year, so it isn't by itself much of a concern.

"What makes this one a bit unusual is that it looks almost like a square," Brunt said. Other scientists said it's common to see icebergs with relatively straight edges but it's rare to have a tabular iceberg with two corners at such right angles 

You can see a more typical, smaller, irregularly shaped tabular iceberg to left of the square one in the photo in this post.

Brunt guessed the iceberg was more than a mile across. Like most icebergs of all stripes, the majoritu of this one is hidden beneath the water's surface.

This one had to be newly-formed, she said, because the edges of it hadn't been rounded off by wind, waves and weather.

The top of the iceberg looks like a great place to go cross country skiing or something, but it's better to look at it from a distance. There are probably cracks and crevices opening or about to, and it would be dangerous to stand on this thing.

So, we'll admire it from a distance.