A huge, flat iceberg with perfect, right angles was spotted on Oct. 16 by NASA’s Operation IceBridge floating among sea ice just off the Larsen C ice shelf.
The iceberg’s unique geometric shape sparked considerable debate on social media that it was formed by – you guessed it – space aliens. Others said it reminded them of the monolith from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
However, according to NASA, there’s a simpler scientific reason why the iceberg appears to be a perfect rectangle.
“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,” Kelly Brunt, an ice scientist with NASA, told Live Science. “And then you have what are called ‘tabular icebergs.'”
Tabular icebergs are wide and flat, and long, like a sheet cake, she said. They split from the edges of ice shelves — large blocks of ice, connected to land but floating in the water surrounding iced-over places like Antarctica. – READ MORE