RWSE Day 12: D32

I ended the last footprint with a photo of us and a bit of a cliffhanger.

I know that you are waiting for the answer. But that’s going to have to wait a bit more. Why? Because I want to tell you about what we had to go around to get to what was on the horizon.

Ahead of Ortelius was a massive iceberg. No, not the one that has been in the news. That’s A23a and it is nowhere near where we are.

This tabular iceberg was D32.

Despite the snow at times obscuring our view, it was amazing … a wall of blueish-white ice that seemed to stretch forever. If you watch the video panning D32, you will see what I mean by that. It very much reminded me of an ice shelf. Well, no surprise … it was born from one.

D32 calved off the Amery Ice Shelf in the eastern Weddell Sea in October 2022 … from the quadrant designated as D in the iceberg naming convention. It had already drifted some 14 NM (16 miles/26 km) from its place of birth before its presence was first reported. At the time, it was at Latitude 68° 25’ S / Longitude 70° 35' W … it measured 90 nautical miles square (119 miles square miles / 309 kilometers square) … give or take a bit of rounding.

I know, I know … a lot of numbers. You see, I was curious to compare its size at birth to what we were told is its size today … 35.25 nautical miles square (47 miles square / 121 kilometers square). That’s quite a bit of melting since D32 began its journey. I guess you could say that unlike a human baby, which continues to grow after birth, an ice shelf baby gets progressively smaller.

We were, of course, nowhere near the Amery Ice Shelf. So how was it that we were seeing D32 today near our location at 70° 48’ S / 9° 45' W? Well, it has to do with the currents around Antarctica. Instead of trying to describe it in words, I’m going to let a few slides from recent lectures and briefings answer the question. (Our approximate position when we sighted D32 is marked with a star on both slides; an arrow points to D32’s birthplace.)  

P.S. You all know that I am uploading these footprints after returning home, so I did an AI search on the current status of D32. It remains in the general vicinity of where we saw it … has drifted maybe a mile or two. But what I found of particular interest was that the AI response included our observation of this berg on the Remote Weddell Sea Explorer expedition. Our five seconds of fame!Meer informatie