Huge iceberg breaks away from Greenland

An iceberg larger than Manhattan has broken away from the Petermann Glacier.

The iceberg, which broke away on 4 August, measures 76 square kilometres and is 150 metres thick – the largest in the Arctic since 2020.

The European Space Agency (ESA) compares its size to the New York island of Manhattan. From a Swedish perspective, it is larger than Ekerö outside Stockholm or roughly the same size as Alnön outside Sundsvall.

The discovery was made using one of the Sentinel satellites, whose radar penetrates both darkness and clouds.

´This type of large, table-shaped iceberg is relatively rare in the Arctic, which makes this calving event a unique opportunity to study how such a large mass of ice drifts, evolves and eventually breaks apart,´says ESA researcher Martin Wearing on the space agency’s website