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Massive Iceberg Breaks Free In Antarctica

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A massive iceberg the size of Delaware has broken free from Antarctica and is floating in the sea. Earlier Wednesday, scientists announced that the 6,000-square-kilometer (about 2,300 square miles) iceberg had come loose, after satellites detected it had calved off the Larsen C ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula. "Put any adjective you like on it: a corker, a whopper — it's a really large iceberg," says Anna Hogg , a researcher with the United Kingdom's Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds. "There have been some this big before," says Adrian Luckman, a glaciologist at Swansea University in the U.K. who leads a project to track changes in the ice shelf. But he adds, the roughly trillion-metric-ton iceberg is unusual. "This is certainly in the Top 10, maybe possibly in the Top 5." Scientists had anticipated the breakup since a massive crack first opened up in the Larsen C ice shelf back in 2014. The crack grew rapidly, and by the end of last week, a

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