× This page contains archived content and is no longer being updated. At the time of publication, it represented the best available science.

The third-largest remaining piece of the slowly disintegrating B17-B iceberg, which broke off Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf a decade ago, resembles a cartoon drawing of a whale in this natural-color image from the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) aboard NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite. The image was captured on December 30, 2009. The berg drifted around the Southern Ocean for years before heading northward into the southern Indian Ocean, southwest of Australia.

NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen, using EO-1 ALI data provided courtesy of the NASA EO-1 team. Caption by Rebecca Lindsey.