The fissure in the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf marks the beginning stages of the birth of a 350-square-mile (900 square kilometers) iceberg, part of a natural process known as calving.
The image was snapped on Nov. 13, 2011, when the rift was roughly 19 miles (30 km) long, 260 feet (80 meters) wide for most of its length, and 195 feet (60 m) deep. When researchers first spotted the crack in mid-October, it was roughly 18 miles (28 km) long.
The ice shelf is the floating end of the Pine Island Glacier, a slow-moving river of ice in West Antarctica that moves ice from the interior of the continent out to sea.
The recent discovery that the glacier has markedly sped up over the last decade has provoked a flurry of research interestin Pine Island Glacier and its ice shelf, whose sudden changes are almost undoubtedly caused by climate change and warming oceans in the region.
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