Massive iceberg A68a, size of Singapore, on course to collide with South Georgia penguin colony island

A collision, while looking increasingly likely, could still be avoided if the currents carry the iceberg past the island, Tarling said.

The currents “still have the power to take this iceberg in one direction or another away from South Georgia,” Tarling said in an interview on Wednesday. “But it is really, really close, less than 50 kilometers away from the south shelf edge. That’s getting so close that it’s almost inevitable.”

Images captured by a British Royal Air Force aircraft show the magnitude of the monstrous, 4,200-square-km iceberg, its surface carved with tunnels, cracks and fissures. A number of smaller ice chunks can be seen floating nearby.

“The sheer size of the A68a iceberg means it is impossible to capture its entirety in one single shot,” British officials said in a statement.

Still, the berg is diminished from its original size of 5,800 square kms, measured when the mass broke off from Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf 2-1/2 years ago.

Scientists fear that the iceberg, in hitting the island, could crush marine life on the sea floor, including coral, sponges and plankton. Should it lodge at the island’s flank, it could block seals along with the island’s 2 million penguins from their normal foraging routes.

Some species, like King penguins, travel for up to 16 days to find food. If the berg gets in the way, that foraging trip could take longer.

“And that’s unlikely to be sustainable. The chicks will start to lose mass,” Norman Ratcliffe, a seabird biologist in the Ecosystems Division of the British Antarctic Survey, said in an interview on Wednesday.

A68a could also be an obstacle to government ships conducting fishery patrols and surveillance around South Georgia and the nearby South Sandwich Islands, British officials said.

Iceberg A68a has been on a slow journey toward potential disaster.

The huge ice mass, which broke from the Antarctic’s Larsen C ice shelf in July 2017, slid toward the open ocean for over two years until it hit the powerful Circumpolar Current that circles the continent.

That propelled the berg north-east through what scientists call “iceberg alley”, and it’s now headed straight for South Georgia Island and could hit the remote world in the southern Atlantic teeming with wildlife within days.

At 4,200 square kilometres, the berg is bigger than Singapore.

“There’s nothing that’s really been that large before in scientific history that we’ve seen coming up to South Georgia,” said Geraint Tarling, a biological oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey.

“Normally we’d expect these icebergs to break apart in the open ocean.”

Scientists say the iceberg could grind over the island’s shelf, crushing underwater life. If it lodges at the island’s flank, it could remain a fixture for up to 10 years before the ice melts or breaks away, Tarling said.

That could block some of the island’s 2 million penguins from reaching the waters to feed their young. Melting freshwater also could make the waters inhospitable for phytoplankton and other creatures in the food chain.

A68a has the scientific community debating if its creation was a consequence of climate change, and whether more such monster bergs are to come.

There have been few larger in recent history, the biggest being B-15, which measured 11,000 square kilometers when it broke from Antarctica’s Ross ice shelf in March 2000.

Whether climate change was directly, or partially, responsible for destabilising Larsen C is a matter of debate, said Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

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Scientists have limited understanding of how the ice behaved historically, as satellite monitoring began only in recent decades, he said. And the continent is influenced by other variables, including strong winds and weather patterns in the tropics.