World's largest iceberg trapped in ocean vortex off Antarctica coast

ST. PETERSBURG. Aug 12 (Interfax) - The world's largest iceberg, A23a, triple the size of Russia's St. Petersburg, has got stuck in an ocean vortex in the Scotia Sea and stopped moving, the press service for St. Petersburg's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute said on Monday.

The iceberg is now slowly spinning in place ejected into the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and may slowly break into pieces as it stays there, institute scientists said.

"The iceberg got stuck in an ocean vortex. It's trapped atop a huge rotating column of water that oceanographers refer to as a Taylor column. [...] There is a high likelihood that A23a will break apart, after which its fragments will continue to head to the Scotia Sea. But this may take a great deal of time due to the iceberg's size," research associate at the institute's oceanography department Sergei Kashin was quoted by the press service as saying.

Despite the winds and currents, A23a has barely decreased in size and remains the world's biggest iceberg, which is currently 4,366 square kilometers large.

A23a broke off from the Filchner Ice Shelf's edge in Antarctica in 1986. At the time, it housed the Druzhnaya-1 seasonal station of the Soviet Antarctic expedition, which was then safely evacuated from the iceberg.

The iceberg had been stuck on a sandbank in the Weddell Sea for 30 years. In the spring of 2023, it unexpectedly began drifting along the Antarctic Peninsula coast toward the Scotia Sea.