The Extraordinary Life And Quiet Death of the World’s Largest Iceberg
July 9, 2026 at 09:30PMThree large portions of the Filchner Ice Shelf—dubbed A22, A23, and A24—calved into the Weddell Sea off of Antarctica in 1986. For National Geographic, Chris Heath documents the life and death of an iceberg called A23a, known at one time as the largest iceberg in the world. Born when it broke off A23 in 1991, it was “at least 44 nautical miles long, 40 nautical miles wide, and somewhere close to 2,000 square miles in area, or roughly the size of Bali.”
Iceberg stories all end the same way, and maybe that’s part of why these frozen giants can so captivate our imagination. Their inescapable destiny mirrors a classic mythic archetype: that something so colossal is ultimately so fragile in its essence, so helpless to avoid its eventual fate. But they also fascinate us because the path they take from enormity to nothingness can be so unpredictable. A23a was just a gigantic block of inanimate material, subject to the complex interactions of this planet’s relentless chemical, physical, and meteorological forces. And yet there is something about an object like this—with all its apparent capriciousness, stoic immensity, and pure extraordinariness—that irresistibly tempts us to project upon it something more.
Many observers presumed that A23a, once in open water, would simply drift northward toward its inevitable fate. But instead, almost as though it realized—and relished—that its story would be one of defying expectations, the iceberg arced above the South Orkney Islands and then did something very strange. In March 2024, A23a’s progress across the ocean simply halted, and it began to twirl.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/07/09/iceberg-a23a-national-geographic/
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