The iceberg broke off the western side of the Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, the European Room Agency (ESA) claimed Wednesday.

The iceberg is formed like a large ironing board, measuring around 170 kilometers (105 miles) in duration and 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) in width. That will make it marginally larger than the Spanish island of Majorca, ESA mentioned.

Iceberg calving is component of the pure cycle, with huge chunks of ice breaking off the ice shelf at standard intervals. Researchers are not attributing this unique split-off to local weather alter, and rather think it’s element of the organic cycle of iceberg calving in the region.

Once it melts, the new iceberg will not direct to a sea level increase, because it was portion of a floating ice shelf — just like a melting ice cube doesn’t maximize the amount of the consume in your glass.

That helps make icebergs like this distinct from glaciers or ice sheets, which are located on land, and which do increase world-wide sea ranges when they split off into the ocean and melt. If Antarctica’s total ice sheet ended up to soften, it could increase sea stages by nearly 190 toes.

ESA reported the iceberg was initially noticed by Keith Makinson, a polar oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey previous week and confirmed from the US National Ice Middle applying ESA’s Copernicus Sentinel-1 imagery.

The substantial chunk of ice is now formally regarded as the A-76. The identify could seem a little bit dull for the world’s biggest iceberg, but it is based mostly on science. ESA stated icebergs are usually named from the Antarctic quadrant in which they ended up originally sighted, then a sequential range, then, if the iceberg breaks, a sequential letter.