The folks at NASA captured an incredible image of a near-perfect rectangular iceberg floating off the Antarctic Peninsula.
NASA shared the image of the iceberg, which looks like it was perfectly chiseled away from a block of ice, on social media late last week.
“A tabular iceberg can be seen on the right, floating among sea ice just off of the Larsen C ice shelf,” NASA’s department of cryospheric sciences tweeted. “The iceberg’s sharp angles and flat surface indicate that it probably recently calved from the ice shelf.”
The agency also captured a triangular berg drifting in the Weddle Sea.
“Triangular iceberg surrounded by many different types of sea ice, off the Larsen ice shelf in the Weddell Sea,” NASA said. “In the open water, grease ice is forming.”
Speaking with Live Science, NASA ice scientist Kelly Brunt said the shapes of the icebergs are formed by a fairly common process.
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“We get two types of icebergs: We get the type that everyone can envision in their head that sank the Titanic, and they look like prisms or triangles at the surface and you know they have a crazy subsurface,” Brunt said. “And then you have what are called ‘tabular icebergs.'”
Brunt explained to the science website that tabular icebergs are long, wide and flat and break away from ice shelves. And when they do break, it’s usually geometrical in shape.
“What makes this one a bit unusual is that it looks almost like a square,” Brunt said, noting that it’s a pretty fresh break.
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