Earth’s largest iceberg on potential collision course with British territory.

Iceberg A23a is moving through the Southern Ocean and could be set to collide with the British island territory, Southern Georgia.

The island is home to multiple species of sea birds, as well as being a breeding ground for king penguins and elephant and fur seals.

Should the iceberg maintain its course for the British island, it could ground and prevent access to feeding sites for millions of the region’s wildlife.

One of icebergs oldest on the planet, A23a is visible from 850,000 miles in space and is thought to be a similar size to that of Cornwall county.

With a surface area of almost 3500 square kilometres and a weight of nearly three trillion tonnes, the warmer waters of the southern Atlantic are expected to cause A23a to melt and break.

This would leave colossal ice masses floating through the region, harming local wildlife populations.

The tabular iceberg was formed when it calved off the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in August 1986. However, A23a remained fixed to the ocean floor of the Weddell Sea for almost forty years.

In November of last year, the gargantuan ice mass broke free of its position north of the South Orkney Islands and is now drifting on the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

Icebergs of the A23a’s scale are known to have the potential to survive in the Southern Ocean despite the warmer waters, which could lead to it moving further north towards South Africa, where it could disrupt shipping.

Dr Andrew Meijers, an oceanographer at British Antarctic Survey stated:

“We are interested to see if it will take the same route the other large icebergs that have calved off Antarctica have taken. And more importantly what impact this will have on the local ecosystem.”