Antarctica's Iceberg a23a had been stuck to the ocean floor for decades but it broke free last November sight imagery from recent months shows a gradually heading north towards Open Water the size is enormous with a surface area of about 1500 square miles iceberg a23a is larger than the state of Rhode Island Dr Andrew Meers joins us he's a polar ocean science leader with a British Antarctic Survey and has studied the iceberg in person so take us up close and personal you've seen this Iceberg but
what does it look like it's it's really impressive to see it's a colossal wall of ice that extends from one horizon to the other um so we spent around about 7 hours steaming just along this uh wall of ice it's around about 40 or so meters high so it's it's a yeah effectively a wall on one side of your one side of your ship as far as you can see wow you know glaciers up close you know can look a little dirty right because of the air and other types of pollution is this relatively clean because i
t's been on the ocean floor or what's sort of the texture of it so it's very pristine white ice so this is the this ice has basically been sitting on the Antarctic continent for many thousands or even millions of years uh since it first fell of snow and then it moved out uh into the O ocean as part of an ey shelf Before 40 years ago snapping off and sitting more or less in the same place near the Antarctic Coast line um and then about 2 years ago it came loose and has been working its way out of
the sea ice and um just earlier this um a few months ago we were there as you can see in the footage uh and it is now making its way northwards out into the open ocean wow I you know I'm just putting my glasses on there to look at that a little bit it's almost like a little bit blue uh along the ridge with the water is that just a reflection or is that actually the the color of the ice yeah I think that largely reflection but you can get some absolutely beautiful ice um this is this ice here is
largely white um that's due to tiny air bubbles that are actually trapped inside the ice which actually have a really great scientific purpose for actually allowing us to measure the air from thousands of years ago uh but you can get other sorts of wait a minute wait a minute so you're saying there's uh air trapped in that ice that's allowing you to assess what the atmosphere was like maybe 10 or 20 or 30,000 years ago absolutely it's one of the one of the projects at the British Antarctic Surv
ey that we undertake is we take ice calls uh at the moment they're searching for a million year old core so that allows us to measure ice back a millions of years it's really how we understand what the climate looked like uh over very long time scales before uh humans started effectively changing it wow that's an incredible Benchmark right as we try and understand how climate is changing uh in the in the modern day okay so so where is it heading now um so this is heading out into what's known as
Iceberg alley um so the process of icebergs breaking off from these shelves is quite a natural process this is a very abnormally large one though um and this will move off into the open ocean as as it encounters that sea ice free water which is significantly warmer it will gradually break up but because it is so massive it could go a very long way and potentially interact with uh some of the subantarctic islands and all the wildlife that live on them on its way and just in the last few seconds
I mean how did you get interested in this area of science is it like being young and you want to be an archaeologist and you woke up one day and went Eureka I want to be an ice scientist how does that work well I always love the ocean I grew up near the ocean and something I wanted to do um but it's a really important part of the global climate the Southern Ocean actually takes up most of the heat that humans have actually generated since the start of the Industrial Revolution uh and it's how it
changes into the future which is something we really poorly understand and is influenced by these Mega icebergs as they melt is something that has great potential consequences for our future in theing decades and centuries uh so it's something that I'm really passionate about understanding and uh getting to go to these places and see icebergs like this is really one of the big bonuses
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