Nasa delighted the world when it announced it had found an uncannily rectangular iceberg floating in the Antarctic. And now it has revealed another one.
The scientists who took the picture that was shared around the world has revealed that he saw another iceberg on the same trip. Both pictures come from the IceBridge project, where Nasa flies planes over the polar ice to assess changes in the height and the state of the ice.
The new specimen is not quite as astonishingly flat and crisp as the iceberg that fascinated the world this week. But it has much of the same appeal, looking as if it is so out of place among the rest of ice and water surrounding it that there is something strange going on.
In the picture above, it can be seen just off the centre, hovering amid a set of much smaller and messier icebergs. The original slab can be seen just off in the left, almost obscured by the plane's engine and wing.
IceBridge senior support scientist Jeremy Harbeck, who took the pictures, said that he sees icebergs with such squared fairly often. But he had never seen one before that looked quite as clean as this, he said.
“I thought it was pretty interesting; I often see icebergs with relatively straight edges, but I've not really seen one before with two corners at such right angles like this one had,” he said.
The famous iceberg wasn't the subject of the scientist's survey – he had in fact been looking at the A68 iceberg, a huge slab the size of a US state that can be seen off in the distance.
“I was actually more interested in capturing the A68 iceberg that we were about to fly over, but I thought this rectangular iceberg was visually interesting and fairly photogenic, so on a lark, I just took a couple photos,” he said.
