Since then, scientists have been monitoring the crack, waiting for the day when it would finally sever a new iceberg off the shelf.
BAS glaciologist Dominic Hodgson said, “This calving event has been expected and is part of the natural behaviour of the Brunt Ice Shelf.
The new iceberg will likely be named A-81, in accordance with iceberg naming conventions, though an official name has yet to be chosen.
Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado, told the Washington Post that the berg “is a huge mass of ice, about 500 billion tons,” but it isn’t the largest iceberg ever recorded.
This week’s calving event marks the second massive iceberg to be created off the Brunt Ice Shelf in recent years.
The Brunt Ice Shelf is home to a BAS research station called Halley VI, which was preemptively moved inland 23 km in 2016 as Chasm-1 continued to widen.
Sea ice levels in Antarctica are constantly in flux, in contrast to the shrinking Arctic, which is being hardest hit by human-caused climate change.