A23a, the largest iceberg ever observed – and oldest too, as it calved off of Antarctica in 1986, has broken loose from some rocks had been holding it up and is on a collision course with the remote British territorial island of South Georgia, Oceanographic Magazine reports.
This fucker is massive: A trillion tons and at 1,400 sq miles, just slightly smaller than the state of Rhode Island’s roughly 1,545 square miles. South Georgia is a mountainous, rocky strip about 106 miles long by 22 miles wide, so it won’t be obliterated by A23a so much as devastated. Just about 30-odd British government researchers are stationed there on the leeward side of the island and won’t be affected, but the same can’t be said about the penguin and marine mammal populations on the island’s southeasterly coast. They might go through some things.