This giant glacier is on a collision course with a British overseas territory

Meanwhile in Antarctica, the world’s largest iceberg is heading for the island of South Georgia…

Transcript

00:00At the moment it's the largest iceberg in the world of all time in terms of our records

00:15it's the fifth largest iceberg on record, but I think more dangerous for icebergs is

00:21where they're going.

00:51We're just hoping that it just goes outside of this corridor.

01:21And then misses South Georgia, but at the moment the trajectory is heading straight

01:25for South Georgia.

01:26Just to give you a context, the iceberg is almost as big as the island of South Georgia

01:30itself.

01:31That means the whole island will not be accessible.

01:43South Georgia is incredibly important.

01:44It's just exactly the right place to make the best of all the nutrients that are coming

01:50out of the Southern Ocean and all the abundance of sea life that these animals can feed on.

02:20Just to paint a picture of it, it's going quite slowly.

02:35It's going at a one kilometer per hour.

02:38So it's a very slow motion event and it will get stuck at about 200 meters depth, which

02:45is about maybe 500 meters to a kilometer away from the shore.

02:50So it won't be right up on the shore, but it'll be close enough to stop the penguins

02:54and seals getting to their feeding grounds beyond there.

02:56They can't get to their feeding grounds and get back to their chicks and pups quick enough

03:01in order to stop them from starving.

03:04The other problem is that if it gets stuck, it could be there for a number of years.

03:08And so this problem could carry on and actually be a really, really difficult for these animals

03:12to survive.

03:34We've written models on this and tried to predict what's going to happen in the future.

03:37And one of the outcomes is that rates of carving will increase.

03:48There are other problems with the iceberg coming up onto the continental shelf.

03:52It's going to scour the bottom of the ocean around South Georgia.

03:56There's an incredibly diverse bottom dwelling community, which is incredible in terms of

04:02the amount of organisms, the types of organisms, but also the amount of carbon that they're

04:06locking in.

04:07If they scour the bottom of the ocean, this carbon could be released back into the atmosphere,

04:11which is a problem for global warming.