Icebergs attack New Zealand!
Hundreds of Antarctic icebergs are floating towards New Zealand.
The chunks of ice have been spotted by satellite and, after passing the Auckland Islands, are heading for the main South Island.
Some of the bergs measure more than 200 metres across and all have come from a massive ice floe which split from the Antarctic as sea and air temperatures rise.
Large numbers of icebergs have not floated this close to New Zealand since 2006, when a number came within 25 kilometres of the coastline - the first such sighting since 1931.
Scientist Neal Young was quoted at Yahoo saying: "All of these have come from a larger one that was probably 30 square kilometres (11.6 square miles) in size when it left Antarctica.
"It's done a long circuit around Antarctica and now the bigger parts of it are breaking up and producing smaller ones."
The icebergs are smaller remnants of the giant chunks seen off Australia's Macquarie Island this month, including one estimated at two kilometres and another twice the size of Beijing's "Bird's Nest" Olympic Stadium.
Young says he expects to see more icebergs in the area if the Earth's temperature continues to increase.
"If the current trends in global warming were to continue I would anticipate seeing more icebergs and the large ice shelves breaking up."
Weird Science Factoid: A microwaved baseball will fly further than a frozen one. It's just not cricket!
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
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