MONTREAL, Arctic ice island, 11 Aug 2010 (From AFP) - The largest ice island in almost 50 years poses no immediate threat as it will take up to two years to drift through the Arctic Ocean, the Canadian who discovered it told AFP. Trudy Wohlleben, a forecaster from the Canadian Ice Service, spotted the massive slab of ice that broke off a glacier in Greenland last week as she analyzed raw data from a NASA satellite.

At about 30 kilometers long and 10 kilometers wide, the ice island is about four times the size of Manhattan and experts say the last time the Arctic lost such a large chunk was in 1962. Wohlleben played down fears the giant iceberg would pose an immediate threat to oil platforms or shipping lanes, saying it would first have to navigate a series of small islands in the Nares Strait. It is likely to get broken down into smaller chunks before it reaches the shipping lanes off the Labrador Coast in Newfoundland, she said, and could even become lodged in a channel or stuck to land.

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These Envisat images, acquired by the ASAR and MERIS instruments, show the progression of the giant iceberg calved along the Nares Strait from the Petermann glacier in northern Greenland, one of the largest of the country's glaciers.

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