Swansea University professor and leader of the team monitoring the rift, Adrian Luckman, told BBC that if the iceberg doesn't "go in the next few months," he'll be amazed. "There hasn't been enough cloud-free Landsat images but we've managed to combine a pair of Esa Sentinel-1 radar images to notice this extension, and it's so close to calving that I think it's inevitable," he added.

The real problem with the iceberg breaking off is that it could affect the rest of Larsen C. Its neighboring ice shelf called Larsen B shattered into thousands of pieces back in 2002, after all. If Larsen C suffers the same fate, global waters would rise by around 8 inches and could damage coastal habitats.