Big cold snap: how nature breaks the ice

THIS is the dramatic photo of a massive iceberg that broke off an Antarctic glacier this month.

Neal Young, the Australian scientist who captured the moment with his camera, said the birth of this iceberg was not evidence of climate change but a natural event - unlike the recent separation of ice from the Antarctic Peninsula.

At about 2545 square kilometres, the iceberg - known as a superberg - is as big as the Australian Capital Territory.

For decades the tongue of the Mertz Glacier, from which the superberg broke, had grown further out into the water until it was about 100 kilometres long by 29 kilometres wide, said Benoit Legresy, a researcher with the LEGOS laboratory for geophysical studies in Toulouse, France.

Dr Young, from the Australian Antarctic Division, said an iceberg that had broken off from another part of Antarctica in 1987 came by and ''gave it a pretty big nudge''.

Dr Legresy said: ''It was a slow process.''

B9B, as the other iceberg is known, was ''sitting there. It must have been pushed and pulled by the current every day and used as a hammer to bang on the other one by the ocean currents.''