The Ocean and Land Color Instrument on Copernicus Sentinel-3 captured this picture of Earth’s largest iceberg, A23a, on 5 April 2025.
Zoom in to discover this picture at its full decision.
The ice mass is at present lodged on the seabed 73 km from the distant island of South Georgia, which might be seen simply poking out from beneath the cloud cowl.
Though the scale of the island isn’t clearly seen on this picture, it is just marginally larger than the iceberg. The A23a is estimated to cowl an space of 3460 sq km – twice the scale of Larger London within the UK. As compared, the island of South Georgia is 3528 sq km.
A picture of the berg was additionally featured by ESA in December 2023 when it was dislodged from the ocean flooring and was pushed by currents away from the Antarctic. It initially calved from Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986. Since then, it has travelled greater than 2000 km.
A23a has began to disintegrate and plenty of smaller blocks of ice are seen at the hours of darkness blue ocean, significantly to the north of the berg. The disintegration is typical of icebergs that attain this far north and is attributable to the hotter sea temperatures and climate circumstances.
South Georgia is a mountainous island 170 km in size, with a central ridge that reaches a peak of 2935 m. It lies within the South Atlantic Ocean, about 1400 km east of the Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas) and northeast of the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.
It’s the largest of the South Georgia and South Sandwich archipelago, a British abroad territory and is residence to a variety of biodiversity, together with penguins and seals, as nicely a British Antarctic Survey analysis station.
