East Antarctica’s Conger ice shelf – a floating platform the size of Rome – broke off the continent on March 15, 2022. Since the beginning of satellite observations in the 1970s, the tip of the shelf had been disintegrating into icebergs in a series of what glaciologists call calving events.
Conger was already reduced to a 50km-long and 20km-wide strip attached to Antarctica’s vast continental ice sheet at one end and the ice-covered Bowman Island at the other. Two calving events on March 5 and 7 reduced it further, detaching it from Bowman and precipitating its final collapse a week later.
