A perfectly shaped rectangular iceberg is “nature acting in a pure and uncomplicated way”, according to an expert.
The enormous block of ice, referred to as a Tabular berg was spotted by NASA scientists and is thought to be a mile in length.
Ted Scambos, senior research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, told the Standard that tabular ice shelves are created when “ice shelves are uniform in thickness and stressed in a uniform way, they then break along very straight lines.
“Sometimes they break periodically, one crack, they’ll go another kilometre and then there will be another crack a little bit further. Then they are quite long and skinny and they truncate with relatively straight edges. You then get blocks that look like they were factory produced.
“It’s just nature acting in a pure uncomplicated way because the physics of the situation are so simple, a plate of ice, stresses that are very uniform all over the whole plate and a very gentle snapping of the ice plate.”
According to NASA researchers, the iceberg’s sharp angles suggest it was recently calved from the ice shelf.
Mr Scambos says the picture taken by NASA is “eye catching because it’s so sharp and perfect and exactly at 90 degrees. That’s actually not all that unusual in Antarctica although one that crisp is a little bit unusual.
“There are lots of areas where ice shelves or glaciers that flow into the ocean slowly break apart leave just a scatter of these sort of domino shaped icebergs floating around because again, it’s a big flat plate of ice that has very uniform stresses trying to crack it, over a long distance and so that’s how you get that sort of pattern.”
It wasn’t the only iceberg formed as a geometric shape the scientists spotted on their flight over the Atlantic last week.
NASA experts shared images online of a triangular berg found in nearby open water in the Weddell Sea on the same trip.
