Once a large iceberg roamed off the coast of England

A new study reveals that there was a time when large icebergs, such as those found in Antarctica, were drifting less than 90 miles from the British coastline.

Scientists first discovered the distinctive ploughmarks carved into these spectacular giants when they dragged them down the North Sea floor off the eastern coast of England about 18,000 to 20,000 years ago.

This was the last ice age, when the ice sheets covering much of the British Isle and the Irish Islands were retreating due to the warming climate. The new research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Deep comb-like grooves, several hundred meters wide, are preserved in sediments buried beneath the seabed today. They appear to be seismic survey data used to find sites for the excavation platform in the witch’s ground basin located between Scotland and Norway.

From the parallel groove sizes, researchers can estimate responsible iceberg dimensions.

“We’re talking about giant flattops, or “surfaces,” marine geophysicist Dr. James Kirkham explained from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

“Conservatively, they measured a width of 5-5km, which can be compared to the area of ​​medium-sized British cities such as Cambridge and Norwich, and could be several hundred metres thick.”

A single groove created by the narrow keel of a small berg has been observed previously, but the wide witch ground tramline is the first clear evidence that monster blocks are crossing the North Sea.

In Antarctica, tabular bergs are discharged from ice shelves. Ice shelves are floating fronts of glacial surges from the land into the ocean.

The perception that 75% of the white continent is surrounded by these buoyant platforms, and that spectacular flat bergs exist in the North Sea indicates that there were ice shelves in the UK and Ireland ice sheets as well.

Such a structure is important for ice sheet stability. Their presence holds back the buttress and glacial ice.

Regular breakaways of tabular bergs at the cutting edge of shelf, which can occur every few decades, help maintain the glacier behind it in steady state or equilibrium.

While it is uncertain how this will change in Antarctica as the world warms, researchers suggest that ancient North Sea cultivation can provide valuable insights.

Dr. Kelly Hogan, co-author of the BAS marine geophysicist, said, “We can use data to document the devastating collapse of these ice shelves at the end of the last ice age. About 18,000 years ago, we detected a type of shift in iceberg Plow-Mark recorded in iceberg sediments recorded in ice vegetation zones. As ice shelves collapse, small icebergs.”

Currently, there are few examples of this transitional behavior in Antarctica. But perhaps the best happened to Larsen B Ice Shelf.

In 2002, warming created a pond of abundant meltwater on its surface, then passed through the platform and crushed the ice into countless tiny bergs in just a week. After the ice shelf collapsed, the glacier had previously returned to its previous speed, increasing its previous speed several times, accelerating its contribution to sea level rise.

This phenomenon appears to have occurred on a much larger scale in the North Sea during a period when the British and Ireland ice sheets were rapidly shrinking 200-300 meters a year at their edges.

What researchers can’t say is whether this rapid withdrawal was caused by the collapse of ice shelves, or whether fragmentation is a symptom of an already ongoing strengthening ice plate mass loss.

Better dates of sediments may provide the answer.

“This is an interesting question at the heart of how ice shelves affect modern Antarctic ice sheets. Observing a similar transition from large tabular icebergs to small icebergs could indicate that the continent is about to experience significant and rapid mass losses.