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Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

See Explanation. Clicking on the picture will download the highest resolution version available.

Voyage of an Antarctic Iceberg

Explanation: What if part of New York broke off and slammed into New Jersey ? Both being anchored land masses , that is unlikely to happen, but an event of that size scale did occur off the Antarctic coast over the last three months. Long Island , New York sized B-15A iceberg floated across 100 kilometers of the Ross Sea and struck a submarine shoal just before an expected impact with the massive Drygalski Ice Tongue , visible on the bottom right of the last image. As it is summer in Earth's Southern Hemisphere , the relatively warm weather was expected to melt and clear much of surrounding ice, but now B-15A blocks much of this ice from floating out to sea. This created a problem not only for ships servicing McMurdo Station but also for penguins expecting to swim. The greater Ross Ice Shelf , from which B-15A calved, has shed several large icebergs over the past few years.

Date February 23, 2005
Credit Credit: MODIS , Terra , NASA
Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
A service of: ASD at NASA / GSFC,
NASA Science Activation & Michigan Tech. U.