The Brief

Ships plying the frigid waters near the Antarctic Peninsula, south of South America, will need to keep an eye on their radar for a floating island of ice: "The largest iceberg in the world, A-23a, is on the move into open ocean!" as the British Antarctic Survey recently announced.

"It's a trillion tons of ice. So it's hard to comprehend just how big a patch of ice this is," Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, told NPR.

Iceberg A23a measures 40 by 32 nautical miles, according to the U.S. National Ice Center. For comparison, Hawaii's island of Oahu is 44 miles long and 30 miles across. And New York City's Manhattan Island is about 13.4 miles long and spans around 2.3 miles at its widest point.

When A23a was still part of an ice shelf, it held a Soviet research station — and it whisked that base off to sea when it floated away in the 1980s (more on that below). The iceberg then became grounded on the seafloor. But in recent years, it has been on the move again, after shaking loose.

Here's a quick recap of the iceberg, its history and its potential future:

It's the world's biggest iceberg

A23a hasn't always held the title. In 2021, for instance, it was supplanted by iceberg A-76, which broke from the Ronne Ice Shelf, also in the Weddell Sea. But that giant soon fractured into smaller icebergs, putting A23a back into the top spot.

"It's truly a gargantuan piece of ice," Scambos said, noting that the iceberg is likely 1,000 to 1,200 feet thick.

Its roots stretch to the austral winter of 1986, when the Filchner Ice Shelf's leading edge broke off to calve three huge icebergs: A22, A23 and A24. In late 1991, A23a became a separate iceberg.

A23a was grounded for decades

Recent satellite images have shown the migration of the mammoth iceberg known as A23a from its origins in the Weddell Sea to its current position on the edge of the open ocean.

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Worldview/NASA Earth Observing System/Screenshot by NPR

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If icebergs were humans, A23a would be a millennial. And like members of that generation who have sometimes been forced to stay home by harsh economic conditions, the iceberg has spent most of its independent existence grounded, stuck to a sandbank in shallow waters.

Little by little, the iceberg kept scouring a path over the seafloor and toward deeper water, nudged by currents, the wind and other factors. A breakthrough came in 2020, when the main bulk of A23a freed itself and started to pivot clockwise on its southeast corner. Before long, it was moving in earnest.

It took ice station Druzhnaya 1 out to sea

A map shows the locations of research stations in Antarctica, focusing on the coast of the Weddell Sea.

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U.S. Geological Survey

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Over the decades, the Filchner Ice Shelf has hosted several countries' research and mapping stations. For about 10 years, that included a Soviet station called Druzhnaya 1.

"When the A23 iceberg calved and floated off" in 1986, "Druzhnaya 1 was still on it," according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

In February 1987, a Soviet ship, the Kapitan Kondratyev, tracked the iceberg down and deployed a landing party aboard a helicopter "to salvage the most valuable equipment from the station," as researchers noted in a recent academic paper.

Life can get weird on an iceberg

If you were to set foot on A23a, Scambos said, you likely wouldn't realize it's an iceberg, floating loose at sea. Its scale would simply fill the horizon; any movement would be imperceptible. He should know. He has camped on icebergs before.

He recalls one odd thing: the disorientation.

"The ice that the base was built on would start to rotate, and that would make the sun do funny things in the sky," Scambos said. "It wouldn't be where it's supposed to be in the morning or in the evening or at night — even though it's 24 hours of daylight."

Over the years, he has heard from people who want to visit an iceberg. And Scambos says that while some of their goals were outlandish (as in, people hoping to declare unilateral sovereignty over an ice kingdom), a gigantic iceberg like A23a is pretty stable — with a big caveat.

"It's not impossible to land on it," Scambos said. "I mean, the upper surface is going to be smooth and snowy and relatively safe, at least for now."

But as the iceberg drifts north and finds warmer conditions, melting and flooding will begin.

"Eventually it will start to crack apart fairly rapidly towards the end," he said. "You wouldn't want to be on it at the end, because the whole thing would be breaking off in pieces and falling into the ocean."

Huge icebergs have drifted far distances

Most icebergs emerging from the Weddell Sea tend to drift slightly eastward toward South Georgia, some 1,000 miles east of the tip of South America.

If that happens to A23a, it could run aground again near South Georgia. But other icebergs, like its sibling A24, have moved more directly north, toward the Falkland Islands.

"Usually they're in the process of breaking up at that point," Scambos said, "although this one is likely to survive longer than most because it came from a colder part of Antarctica" and is thick, along with having a heavy buildup of snowfall.

If A23a doesn't get hung up in shallow and warmer waters, he added, "it could wind up drifting south of Africa into the Indian Ocean. They've even drifted all the way into the Pacific and wound up coming up on Chile, almost circumnavigating the globe. Some of the largest icebergs have done that in the past."

You can learn a lot from an iceberg

Massive icebergs like A23a scrape and scour the seafloor in shallow waters.

"There's a lot of life that lives in the bottom of the ocean that is just completely crushed, wrecked, when one of these things passes over," Scambos said. "That's it for the ecosystem that lives in that part of the ocean."

But the icebergs also give scientists an idea of the changes wrought when massive plates of ice, formed in the coldest parts of the world, suddenly find themselves in warmer conditions.

"The main scientific source of interest for the iceberg is sampling ocean surface waters behind, near, and just ahead of it," Em Newton of the British Antarctic Survey said of A23a, in a message to NPR. Researchers, she added, want "to understand the effects of temperature, changes to salinity, released nutrients, etc., along its path."

This part of the Southern Ocean is normally very poor in nutrients. An iceberg like A23a, Scambos says, can help change that by shedding nutrients it accumulated from Antarctica and stirring up deep water, possibly sparking a plankton bloom in its wake.

What about climate change?

News of the iceberg's peregrination comes after record warm temperatures and low levels of sea ice have been recorded around Antarctica in recent years.

"In February 2023, sea ice around Antarctica reached the lowest extent ever observed since the start of the satellite record in 1979," the NASA Earth Observatory said.

And in September, researchers at the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported the lowest winter maximum extent of Antarctic sea ice. It was found to be nearly 400,000 square miles below the previous low, set in 1986.

"But despite several recent years of low extents, the long-term trend for sea ice in southern polar waters is essentially flat," the NASA Earth Observatory said, adding, "it is the declines in sea ice at the other pole — in the Arctic — that are pushing the global sea ice trend downward."

Scambos agrees, noting that A23a came from a part of Antarctica that is fairly stable.

"These big icebergs are spectacular, but they're just the way Antarctica works. This is how an ice sheet works. It gathers snow, and the snow thickens and flows off into the ocean, and then pieces break off. And in Antarctica, those pieces are really, really large," he said.

"But the more important thing for people to be aware of is that Antarctica in other places is losing ice very rapidly," Scambos said, describing a dynamic that contributes to rising sea levels.

"And that actually is a much more serious problem."

Lines stretched around the block Sunday at the Original Saugus Cafe in Santa Clarita. It was supposed to be the restaurant's last day before closing after 139 years — making it the oldest continually operated restaurant in Los Angeles County.

But earlier this week, a sign was posted on the door saying, "Reopening under new ownership soon," although there were few details about who would be running it.

The sign was a surprise to the Mercado family, who have operated the restaurant for nearly 30 years. The family now is in a legal dispute with the Arklin family, who owns the property, about the potential re-opening and who owns the historic name.

The background

Alfredo Mercado worked his way up from bartender to restaurateur, purchasing the business in 1998. Since then Mercado and his daughters have operated the restaurant, leasing from the Arklin family. For most of that time, according to the Mercado side, the two families maintained good terms. Property owner Hank Arklin Sr., a former state assemblyman who owned other properties in the area, kept a verbal month-to-month agreement with the Mercados — no written lease required.

That changed when Arklin died in August at age 97.

New terms, failed negotiations

Larry Goodman, who manages multiple properties for the Arklin family's company, North Valley Construction, took over the landlord relationship. In September, the Mercado family say they were presented with a new written month-to-month lease.

Yecenia Ponce, Alfredo's daughter, said the new terms included various changes to the existing agreement, including a rent increase and charges for equipment.

Months of back and forth negotiations about different options, including selling the business, ultimately fell apart. Their attorney, Steffanie Stelnick, says they are being forced out, without proper legal notice, and has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Goodman saying the family has plans to continue running the business.

LAist reached out to Goodman for comment repeatedly Wednesday and Thursday by phone but did not hear back.

Goodman told The Signal, a Santa Clarita valley news outlet, that Alfredo Mercado had changed his mind several times in recent weeks about keeping the business.

“I said, ‘Fine,’ then I got out and got someone to take it over,” Goodman said.

He said he'd been in contact with Eduardo Reyna, the CEO of Dario's, a local Santa Clarita restaurant, and that the cafe could re-open as soon as Jan. 16.

Who owns what?

The dispute also focuses on who owns the rights to the Original Saugus Cafe name.

Ponce said when her father purchased the restaurant in 1998, it was called The Olde Saugus Cafe, but the name was then changed to The Original Saugus Cafe. State records show that name registered as an LLC under Alfredo Mercado.

After Arklin’s death, however, the Arklin family filed a pending trademark application to lay its own claim to the name.

The Mercado family is resisting.

"As long as they don't buy the name from us, we're not handing it over," Ponce said.

Ponce said the family had no idea the landlord planned to continue operations.

"We truly did think we were closing," she said. "We were not aware that they had plans to continue."

She apologized to customers for the confusion.

Whether the decades-old restaurant name survives — and under whose control — may ultimately be decided in court.

Community leaders and politicians in Los Angeles are responding in outrage after an ICE agent shot and killed a woman in Minnesota on Wednesday.

The fatal ICE shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good has sparked anger and fear in Los Angeles, which has been an epicenter of federal immigration enforcement since the summer.

Jorge-Mario Cabrera with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, says the killing was upsetting but not surprising.

" Los Angeles has been witness of the escalating aggressiveness of these federal agents against the community," he told LAist.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has defended the shooting, saying Good was trying to run agents over with her car. That account has been disputed by eyewitnesses, the mayor of Minneapolis and other officials. Bystander video also challenges the federal narrative, according to MPR News.

L.A. politicians have joined a chorus demanding justice for Good. Mayor Karen Bass posted on X, saying that ICE agents are waging "a purposeful campaign of fear and intimidation" on American cities.

"The senseless killing of an innocent and unarmed wife and mother by ICE agents today in Minneapolis is shocking and tragic and should never have occurred," she said in the post.

L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn called on Noem to withdraw ICE from U.S. cities.

“These ICE agents are undertrained and trigger happy and everyone who has seen this video knows ICE murdered this woman,” she said in a statement.

Some protesters also gathered outside the federal building in downtown L.A. Thursday morning to condemn the killing.