An enormous ice floe has been sighted off the coast of Melrakkaslétta, a peninsula in northeast Iceland, Vísir reports. It is likely that the floe, said to resemble an ‘island of ice,’ broke off the Greenland ice sheet and was carried toward Iceland with the ocean current.
The Icelandic Met Office received reports of two ice floes in the area on Thursday, one of which appears to be moored to the seafloor and the other of which appears to be free-floating, although it’s not currently moving very much.
In a conversation with Vísir, Pedro Rodrigues, the Station Manager at the Rif Field Station in Melrakkaslétta, said that he believes the ice floe is roughly 500 meters long [1,640 ft; .3 mi; .4 km], although it’s difficult to say for certain since it’s currently so far from land.
Cloud cover in the area is currently too dense for the Met to obtain good satellite photographs, so currently, the only available image of the floe is one that was taken from land, using a 65x zoom. This clearly exaggerates its size, but also seems to indicate that it is genuinely quite big.
