World’s biggest iceberg appears to have run aground near remote British island

Scientists watching for possible impact on local wildlife
By: Alexandra Mae Jones · CBC News
The world’s largest iceberg appears to have run aground off the coast of a remote British island home to millions of penguins and seals — potentially threatening local wildlife, but also providing an opportunity for research into such rare “megabergs.”
Known as A23a, the massive slab of ice — roughly the size of Rhode Island and weighing nearly a trillion tonnes — was first reported to be heading toward South Georgia months ago, sparking concerns that it could collide with the island and disrupt the balance for local wildlife.
The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said Tuesday that the iceberg had apparently struck the continental shelf that surrounds South Georgia, getting stuck roughly 73 kilometres from the island itself.·
Whether A23a will be stuck for an extended period — and what impact it could have on local wildlife — is still up in the air.
“It will be interesting to see what will happen now,” Andrew Meijers, an oceanographer with BAS, said Tuesday.
The sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia is a British overseas territory that lies north of Antarctica and some 1,850 kilometres east of South America. It supports a tiny, non-permanent population of scientists and researchers, but is known best for its abundance of wildlife, including five million seals across four different species and 65 million birds across 30 different species. Among them are the wandering albatross, the largest flying bird in the world, and several types of penguins. One of the concerns among researchers is that the iceberg could block wildlife from their normal pathways to feeding sites, forcing them to travel longer distances and bring back less food to their young.
But Meijers noted that icebergs store important micronutrients which are released when they melt, and can also stir up nutrients settled in deep water, potentially benefiting the local ecosystem.
If this “towering wall” of ice stimulates ocean productivity, it could “boost populations of local predators like seals and penguins,” he said. Source: cbc.ca/news