Researchers are currently busy trying to gauge the impact A68 had on the environment.

And a team led from Leeds University has been back through all the satellite data to calculate the behemoth's changing dimensions as it moved north from the White Continent, through the Southern Ocean and up into the South Atlantic.

This has enabled the group to assess varying melt rates during the course of the megaberg's three-and-a-half-year existence.

One of the key periods, obviously, was towards the end, as A68 approached the warmer climes of the British Overseas Territory of South Georgia.

For a while, there were fears the giant block could ground in the surrounding shallows, blocking the foraging routes of millions of penguins, seals and whales.

But it never quite happened because, as the team can now show, A68 lost sufficient depth of keel to stay afloat.

"It does seem that it briefly touched the continental shelf. That's when the berg took a turn and we saw a small piece break off. But it wasn't enough to ground A68," lead author Ms Anne Braakmann-Folgmann from the Nerc Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at Leeds told BBC News.