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“Then it will break up into many pieces and begin calving smaller icebergs, like glaciers do. That’s what previous ones have done,” says Landau, who runs the conservation group based in Carbondale, Colorado. “We think it will probably ground itself before it gets that close to South Georgia. Landau says most of the penguins and seals have their colonies on the north shore, which is roughly the shape of New York’s Long Island. Instead, she’s watching and waiting from afar to see which direction the iceberg will take.

South Georgia Island has no airstrip, and it's too far for a helicopter ride, so the tiny crew of researchers there might be watching and hoping the iceberg doesn’t land on their side of the island, either.ĭenise Landau, president of the Friends of South Georgia Island, was scheduled to spend several months there this fall doing conservation work and running a small museum for tourists. British government officials are monitoring the A-68A iceberg with drone and airplane flights from the Falkland Islands, which is about 960 miles away. Today, in addition to its wildlife, the island is home to a British research station that has seen its population of scientists and hardy tourists decline during the Covid-19 pandemic.

He returned to South Georgia Island on a later expedition and died of a heart attack in 1922. Shackleton and two crewmen were forced to traverse the island’s rugged peaks to reach a whaling station and to organize a rescue of the remainder of his crew, who were stranded on another island 700 miles away. The island is known as the final resting place of Ernest Shackleton, the British explorer who landed there after his ill-fated expedition to Antarctica in 1915. When it will impact the island is hard to say.” “A few weeks is probably a reasonable estimate. “They can move their own length in one day,” says David Long, director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Brigham Young University, which keeps a database of large Antarctic icebergs that are being tracked by satellite. Measuring 94 miles long and 30 miles wide, it's nearly as big as South Georgia Island itself, and is expected to arrive sometime in the next two weeks. Known officially as A-68A, the iceberg has been meandering north since it broke off from Antarctica’s Larsen Ice Shelf in September 2017. A massive Antarctic iceberg is headed straight for South Georgia Island, a remote outpost in the southern Atlantic Ocean that is home to millions of seabirds, penguins, and seals that may find their route to the sea blocked if the Delaware-sized chunk of ice gets stranded near their breeding grounds.