Antarctica gives birth to world's largest iceberg

The newly calved berg, designated A-76 by scientists, was spotted in recent satellite images captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission

A giant slab of ice bigger than the Spanish island of Majorca has sheared off from the frozen edgeof Antarctica into the Weddell Sea, becoming the largest iceberg currently afloat in the world, the European Space Agency said on Wednesday. The newly calved berg, designated A-76 by scientists, was spotted in recent satellite images captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, the space agency said in a statement posted on its website with a photo of the enormous, oblong ice sheet. Its surface area spans 4,320 square km (1,668 square miles)and measures 175 km long by 25 km wide.