As anticipated, a massive iceberg has detached from Antarctica.

The event we've been expecting has finally occurred. As Mytour reported last week, the Larsen ice shelf has been undergoing significant changes over the past few decades, most recently with a widening rift in the Larsen C section threatening a complete breakoff. This week, the split finally happened, forming an iceberg the size of Delaware. Weighing over a trillion tons, it's one of the largest icebergs ever recorded.

Larsen A and B sections collapsed in 1995 and 2002, respectively, significantly altering the Antarctic Peninsula's coastline.

The crack in Larsen C spread slowly at first, almost at a glacial pace. However, by June 2017, it was progressing rapidly, widening by approximately 32 feet per day. Experts from Swansea University’s Project Midas, which monitors the ice shelf, had predicted that the break would occur within "hours, days, or weeks."

It took just about a week. New satellite imagery from NASA’s Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) shows a clear split in the ice shelf.

"The rift was almost undetectable in recent weeks," Adrian Luckman from Swansea University told the BBC, "but the evidence is now so undeniable that it must have expanded significantly along its entire length."

The exact reason behind the split is still unclear. While climate change is contributing to the melting of sea ice globally, experts believe this particular fracture may have been unavoidable.

"We know that rifts like this periodically form, causing large tabular icebergs to break away from ice shelves, even without any climate-driven influences," Chris Borstad from the University Centre in Svalbard told the BBC. "I’m collaborating with several colleagues to design field experiments on Larsen C to address this specific question (by directly measuring the properties of the Joerg suture zone). But until we conduct more measurements on-site, all we can do is speculate."