Thursday, November 26, 2009
SHIPS are on alert and maritime authorities are monitoring the movements of hundreds of menacing icebergs drifting toward New Zealand in the southern Pacific Ocean, officials said.
"It’s an alert to shipping to be aware these potential hazards are around and to be on the lookout for them," Maritime New Zealand spokeswoman Sophie Hazelhurst said of an official navigation warning issued for the area south of the country.
The current flotilla of icebergs that split off Antarctic ice shelves is slowly drifting in the direction of New Zealand. The nearest one, measuring about 330ft to 660ft long, was 260km south- east of New Zealand’s Stewart Island on Tuesday, said Australian glaciologist Neal Young.
He counted 130 in one satellite image alone and 100 in another.
Icebergs are routinely sloughed off as part of the natural development of ice shelves. As temperatures have risen in the Antarctic Peninsula area near South America by as much as 3C in the past 60 years, "whole ice shelves have broken up", Young said.
But Young said the iceberg flotilla south of New Zealand came from the Ross Sea, a different area of Antarctica.
The emergence of icebergs in waters south of New Zealand depends as much on weather patterns and ocean currents as the rate icebergs are calving off Antarctic ice shelves.
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