The View From Above | The Conservation Report

A massive iceberg, named B-9B, collided with the Mertz Glacier Tongue in Antarctica to shed another massive iceberg the size of Luxembourg. The image at right shows the Mertz Glacier Tongue and the B-9B iceberg during December 2007 before the collision, and the image below shows the aftermath of the collision.

According to the BBC, the two massive icebergs have changed the geography of the region and may threaten local marine line. More from the European Space Agency:

This animation, made up of eight Envisat radar images, shows the 97-km long B-9B iceberg (right) ramming into the Mertz Glacier Tongue in Eastern Antarctica in early February 2010. The collision caused a chunk of the glacier’s tongue to snap off, giving birth to another iceberg nearly as large as B-9B. The new iceberg, named C-28, is roughly 78-km long and 39-km wide, with a surface area of 2500 sq km (the size of Luxembourg).

Envisat’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) acquired these images from 10 February to 4 March in Wide Swath Mode, providing spatial resolution of 150 m. ASAR can pierce through clouds and local darkness and is capable of differentiating between different types of ice.

If the image below isn’t animating, then click on it to see the animated GIF showing the collision in action: