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On May 26, 2021, iceberg A-76 lost two big chunks of ice (now A-76B and A-76C) and, with them, the title of biggest iceberg on Earth. The title went back to A-23A at 3,880 square kilometers.
Before its break, A-76 measured around 4,320 square kilometers in size. The berg is around 170 kilometers in length and 25 kilometers wide, and it was slightly larger than the Spanish island of Majorca.
The iceberg was spotted by the British Antarctic Survey and confirmed from the U.S. National Ice Center using Copernicus Sentinel-1 imagery. The Sentinel-1 mission consists of two polar-orbiting satellites that rely on C-band synthetic aperture radar imaging, returning data regardless of whether it is day or night, allowing us year-round viewing of remote regions like Antarctica.
Image Credit: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021), processed by ESA
