What is the largest iceberg recorded?
In the Northern Hemisphere, the largest iceberg on record was encountered in 1882 near Baffin Island. It was 13 km long, 6 km wide, and was about 20 m above water. The weight of the iceberg was over 9 billion tonnes – enough for everyone in the world to drink a litre of water a day for more than 4 years. Even though this is an astounding statistic, icebergs from Antarctica may be many times larger than this. Take, for example, in 1987 when an iceberg with an area of 6350 square kilometres calved from the Ross ice shelf. That berg had a weight of roughly 1.4 trillion tonnes and could have provided everyone in the world with 240 tonnes of pure drinking water.
