NASA Captures a Bizarre 130-Foot-Tall Iceberg in Antarctica That's Almost a Perfect Rectangle

While mathematical patterns can be recognized in many things, nature itself does not create things that are mathematically perfect. But when NASA scientist Jeremy Harbeck looked from his airplane on a surveying flight over the Antarctic Peninsula, he was bewildered and bemused at the same time. Along with the typical wedge, dome, and blocky-shaped chunks of ice, there was a “perfectly rectangular” iceberg floating on the icy peninsula. After NASA released the photo of this “perfectly mathematical but unnatural” berg, people likened it to everything from alien visitors and a giant ice cube, to a chainsaw-wielding man and ice-cream sandwich.

The monolithic slab of ice, featuring perfect 90-degree angles, was found floating just off the Larsen C ice shelf in early October 2018. Harbeck snapped the image as part of “Operation IceBridge,” NASA’s longest-running aerial survey of polar ice. The project was supposed to capture images of Earth’s polar regions and monitor how these regions respond to climate change.

“I thought it was pretty interesting, I often see icebergs with relatively straight edges, but I’ve not really seen one before with two corners at such right angles like this one had,” Harbeck said in a NASA press release. “I was actually more interested in capturing the A68 iceberg that we were about to fly over, but I thought this rectangular iceberg was visually interesting and fairly photogenic, so on a lark, I just took a couple photos,” he added.

According to Forbes, the tabular iceberg, which was “larger than the island of Jamaica, calved off the Ross Ice Shelf in 2000.” Despite its atypical appearance, the tabular iceberg was not absolutely natural, Kelly Brunt, a NASA glaciologist and an associate research scientist at the University of Maryland, told Live Science. She added that these flattened out icebergs are wider than they are deep and they can span hundreds of miles across. Writing in The Conversation, ice shelf glaciologist from the University of Tasmania, Sue Cook, reflected that as time goes on, this angular iceberg will start to deform and eventually show signs of collapse. 

“Waves will start to erode these edges, creating large arches and caving in its walls. The iceberg will also continue to break and crack, losing chunks of ice around the edge, and possibly even fragmenting into smaller pieces,” she described. Cook also explained that the paths icebergs usually take are important, geologically, as they release chemicals and micronutrients into the ocean as they float away. This changes the chemical properties, determining the ocean currents and overall ocean biology. The largest iceberg ever observed is known by the name “B-15,” which was released from Antarctica in 2000. 

B-15’s fragments are still floating in some regions of Antarctica. Cook shared that it survived for so long due to its size, 183 miles by 21 miles. But it seems very unlikely that this rectangular iceberg, which is not even a mile long, will survive for too long. “It is likely to move further around the coast and slowly disintegrate and melt before it leaves Antarctic waters. As it moves, it will lose its photogenic shape, with its edges eroding away and losing their perfectly straight lines,” Cook wrote. Scientists believe that investigating the journey of this iceberg will help them gain some information about the accelerating global warming and climate change.