The Ice Man army is on the way to kick our ass. They warned us in 30 years, if we did not change our ways, we will be destroyed. I will miss you when the second Age of Ice arrives, brothers.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

“I asked a couple of colleagues about this, wondering if there was any possible change in shelf water temperatures that might have provoked it, but the consensus is the time had just come,” said Dr Andrew Fleming, a remote sensing expert from the British Antarctic Survey.

A23a has put on a spurt in recent months, driven by winds and currents, and is now passing the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.

This is the same movement of water - and accompanying westerlies - that the famous explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton exploited in 1916 to make his escape from Antarctica following the loss of his ship, the Endurance, in crushing sea-ice.

Shackleton aimed his lifeboat for South Georgia, and it’s at this island that you will frequently see the big tabular bergs sitting offshore.

As these big bergs melt, they release the mineral dust that was incorporated into their ice when they were part of glaciers scraping along the rock bed of Antarctica.

“In many ways these icebergs are life-giving; they are the origin point for a lot of biological activity,” said Dr Catherine Walker, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who was born in the same year as A23a.

The original article contains 607 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

I bet its parents are just happy for it to be finally leaving home.

For comparison, the London Shard, the tallest skyscraper in Europe, is a mere 310m tall.

Wikipedia says the Shard was the tallest building in Europe only from 2011 to 2012.

Winter is coming.