Biggest Iceberg: The biggest iceberg ever, roughly the size of Connecticut (295 kilometers long and 37 wide) is floating free in the Ross Sea, north of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. This is part of the global warming problem, and scientists are concerned that the whole of the ice shelf might disintegrate, filling southern seas with dangerous bergs and raising sea levels as they float northward and melt. Their current concerns, however, focus on where this huge berg, designated B-15(2000) by the US National Ice Center, might go and whether it might break up.

The birth announcement for B-15 is at http://www.news.wisc.edu/thisweek/view.msql?id=3834. Other interesting ice and Antarctic links are also on this page.

More pictures and information are at http://uwamrc.ssec.wisc.edu/amrc/iceberg.html.

PS -- Huge bergs are less dangerous than small ones. The big ones are tracked from the moment they are calved while the small ones often go unobserved until a Titanic comes along.

-- Of course it's "north" of the ice shelf. Think about it: if you're standing on the South Pole, you can't see anything but north in every direction, so anything moving away from the South Pole of rotation has to move north. To get an idea where anything is really going in polar regions, you also need to know longitude. As it happens, the Ross Shelf and Sea straddle the 180 degree International Date line (maybe it's tomorrow) and if the berg were to continue straight north (it won't) it would eventually hit Samoa. To see a composite picture of Antarctica, with the site of the calving of B-15 indicated, go to http://uwamrc.ssec.wisc.edu/amrc/COMPOSITE.GIF.