Here's why the world's biggest iceberg is stuck spinning in circles for months

About 375 miles northeast of the Antarctic Peninsula, near the South Orkney islands, there’s a slow-motion dance going on. Emerging out of the seawater’s surface is a colossal ice block weighing about one trillion tons, which is trapped by a cylindrical vortex of water churning below it, causing it to become a spinning top. This block is the world’s largest iceberg dubbed “A23a.” In February 2024, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) declared that A23a is in its “spinning era,” and shared footage of the city-sized iceberg spinning, with Kylie Minogue’s “Spinning Around” playing as the background score. This spinning motion of the berg has caught massive attention on the internet, given that it has such an interesting backstory.

Currently, the berg is “maintaining a chill 15-degree rotation per day,” as the BAS wrote on X. However, for the past three decades, the iceberg was still perfectly positioned at the Weddell Sea's bottom. It was not until 2020 that A23a finally detached and broke free from the seafloor, and started moving towards the Southern Ocean, per The New York Times. However, as it turned out, the iceberg never moved away. It stayed there for what seemed like a slow-motion dance session. It is now spinning on the other side of the South Scotia Ridge.

BAS used the imagery captured by instruments aboard NASA satellites between December 2023 to February 2024 to demonstrate the consistent rotation of the iceberg. But it's spinning around is not for no reason. This is a scientific phenomenon known as a “Taylor column.”

IFL Science explains Taylor’s Column as when a rotating cylinder of water forms when an ocean current meets a seamount. In this case, it is the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, that BBC describes as “a juggernaut that moves a hundred times as much water around the globe as all Earth's rivers combined.” This vigorous current meets a seamount or an underwater mountain in the Scotia Sea to trigger this twirling motion of A23a.

“It’s basically just sitting there, spinning around and it will very slowly melt as long as it stays there,” said Alex Brearley, a physical oceanographer and head of the Open Oceans research group at the British Antarctic Survey, per The New York Times. “What we don’t know is how quickly it will actually come out of this.”

Usually, after detaching from the seabed, most icebergs drift into the warmer waters, and after a warm bath, they eventually melt. But the fate of this gigantic iceberg is still uncertain. Different experts have different opinions as to what awaits it. For instance, Christopher A. Shuman, a glaciologist and research professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, told The New York Times that A23a would eventually move toward the island of South Georgia in the South Atlantic and melt. Whereas, polar expert Professor Mark Brandon believes that “Usually you think of icebergs as being transient things; they fragment and melt away. But not this one,” per BBC. According to Mark, “A23a is the iceberg that just refuses to die.”