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Comment by wklauss | Hacker News Reader

What will be the most likely scenario now? will we see this piece drift away and melt? stay relatively close to the current area? and if it will start drifting, how far can it go with such an impressive amount of ice?

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>The iceberg is one of the largest recorded and its future progress is difficult to predict. It may remain in one piece but is more likely to break into fragments. Some of the ice may remain in the area for decades, while parts of the iceberg may drift north into warmer waters.

http://www.projectmidas.org/blog/calving/

On wiki there's this good illustration of what happened over time to iceberg B-15, which calved in 2002 and it is the largest recorded iceberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_B-15#/media/File:B15a_...

Non-media-viewer link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:B15a_a4.jpg

Many of these get hung up since there are many areas they have to drift through that are not deep enough, so they get stuck and just melt in place. This chunk is about 2/3 the size of Big Island in Hawaii. There have been other bigger ones. I think there is one relatively large sized (or whats left of it) one near New Zealand. You have to realize the oceans are really huge and hitting one of these is highly unlikely.

The bigger question is how the remaining shelf breaks apart; people are not sure if its more stable or more unstable after this calving; with huge ice areas its not always easy to predict.

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