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Images taken in November last year show the length of the rift. NASA

An iceberg measuring about 1,930 square miles, one of the 10 largest-ever recorded and considered to be nearly twice the size of Rhode Island state or roughly the size of Delaware, is reportedly ready to break away from Antarctica, according to scientists.

Scientists monitoring the condition of the 350-meter( about 1148.29 feet) thick Larsen C ice shelf — the fourth-largest Antarctic ice shelf located in Western Antarctica that holds back the flow of glaciers that feed into it – say that only 20 kilometers (about 12.4 miles) of ice is holding the iceberg from floating away, according to the BBC.

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The current location of the rift on Larsen C. Project MIDAS

Swansea-based researchers contend that if the iceberg breaks away, it could cause major instability in the Larsen C ice shelf and may even make the shelf vulnerable to similarly break away.

Aerial photographs taken in February and March 2002 of parts of the Larsen B shelf in the Antarctic show different aspects of the final stages of the collapse
-COMBO PHOTO- Aerial photographs taken in February and March 2002 of parts of the Larsen B shelf in the Antarctic show different aspects of the final stages of the collapse that has reignited fears of global warming and its catastrophic effects. The pictures show (clockwise from top left) the shelf breaking up near Foca Nunatak, a rift in the ice sheet near Cape Desengano, a cascade of water from melting ice nearly 30 meters high along the front of the shelf, and the new front edge of the shelf breaking up near Cape Foyn. About 500 billion tons of ice of the Larsen B shelf have disintegrated over the last month, the result of 50 years of sharp temperature rises on the Antarctic Peninsula unmatched elsewhere on the ice continent and in the rest of the world. REUTERS/STR New

Last year, researchers from the British Antarctic Survey-funded collaboration Project MIDAS noticed that the shelf, whose neighbors Larsen A and B collapsed in 1995 and 2002 respectively, had a huge and rapidly growing rift.

The rift, which grew by over 18 miles in length between 2011 and 2015, grew another 13.7 miles by October since it was last observed in March 2016. However, the size of the rift began stretching even more in December, where it grew by another 11 miles.

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The rift is about 100m wide but is estimated to be half a kilometre deep. NASA

"If it doesn't go in the next few months, I'll be amazed…There hasn't been enough cloud-free Landsat images but we've managed to combine a pair of Esa Sentinel-1 radar images to notice this extension, and it's so close to calving that I think it's inevitable." Professor Adrian Luckman, project leader from Swansea University, told BBC News.

Paul Holland of the British Antarctic Survey, the lead author of a study on the melting of the Larsen C ice shelf that was published in 2015, estimated a rise of almost 4 inches as a result of the loss of ice that Larsen C holds back.

Rising sea levels due to global warming is expected to have catastrophic effects, including massive loss of life as it puts thousands of coastal cities at risk. This animation shows where the levels are going, and by how much:

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