By SETH BORENSTEIN

The world’s largest and most enduring iceberg is splintering into smaller pieces, to the point that it’s no longer the biggest chunk of ice floating in the oceans.

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The shrinking megaberg, known as A23A, is unlikely to survive through the end of November and may face a sudden and spectacular collapse like an avalanche of ice at sea, said University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos.

“It’s an interesting thing to watch, certainly not unprecedented,” Scambos said Thursday in an interview with The Associated Press. “But every time these happen, it’s sort of a big spectacular event.”

Because ice shelves already float on water, ice reductions like this won’t raise the sea level. But the reduction in ice shelves will cause melting land glaciers to flow into the oceans, and that causes sea levels to rise a few feet (meters).

A23A first broke away from Antarctica’s Filchner–Ronne Ice Shelf in 1986 along a massive crack that scientist first noticed in the 1950s and called “the Grand Chasm.” It hovered close to the southern continent for about three-and-a-half decades uneventfully until the last couple years when it drifted north to the place where massive icebergs go to die, around South Georgia Island, Scambos said.

Earlier this year the iceberg was the size of Rhode Island and weighed in at a trillion tons, now it’s down to the size of Houston and shrinking fast. The world’s new biggest iceberg is D15A. It’s nearly twice as big as the shrunken A23A, according to Andrew Meijers of the British Antarctic Survey.

A23A has already spawned smaller chunks named A23D, A23E and A23F. NASA satellite images Thursday show the smaller bergs that weren’t detached on Saturday, just a few days before.

“It’s still quite thick, but it’s a lot thinner than it was when it left the continent,” Scambos said. “And so now it’s being flexed by long period waves, by tides, which sweep across the area. And with that flexing, even though it’s incredibly gentle and subtle. It’s finding weak spots in the iceberg, and those are breaking off.

“I expect its fracturing will accelerate,” Meijers said via email. As the iceberg moves further north and the Antarctic spring begins Meijers expects by the end of the season, A23A will likely rapidly fall apart into chunks too small to track, he said.

If the iceberg survives the Antarctic spring, the summer looks even more brutal, Scambos said. That’s when it can collapse with warm water even at the top and it will then look “sort of like an avalanche that’s floating” and even fall apart in a single day, he said.

Back in January, Meijers, who visited the iceberg at the end of 2023, painted a different picture of A23A: “The iceberg itself is colossal and it stretches from horizon to horizon … It’s a huge wall, a Game of Thrones style wall of ice that towers above the ship.”

Megabergs spawning is a natural process that has happened for centuries, Meijers said, and so is their breaking apart around South Georgia Island when the current and warmer waters get hold of them, Scambos said.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Carl Pedro, Sr. arrived at Ellis Island in New York from Italy in 1906, a few years before opening his first shoe shop in St. Paul. His granddaughter, Gina Pitera, 72, has waited years for the former site of her father’s and grandfather’s luggage store — which was demolished in 2011 — to welcome a new generation of visitors.

For decades, residents of the Fitzgerald neighborhood have longed for some green space of their own in the area south of the Minnesota State Capitol campus and tucked between Interstate 35E and Seventh Street, a few blocks from the core of downtown St. Paul.

On Thursday, they finally got their wish. A who’s who of elected officials and downtown advocates, including Mayor Melvin Carter, City Council President Rebecca Noecker and longstanding community residents, gathered to inaugurate the city’s newest parkland — Pedro Park, at 10th and Robert streets.

Measuring about a half block, the new park spans a covered event pavilion and picnic shelter, cafe tables, seating, a dog run, play area, gardens, plaza space, tree plantings and open lawn area directly across from the former Lunds & Byerlys grocery and down the street from the former St. Joseph’s Hospital.

“We’re so excited,” said Lowertown resident Jamie Daniels, who visited the park Thursday with their 8-year-old daughter. “It went from a place you might accidentally find yourself at to a place you want to go to.”

The 0.87-acre park fills in the area previously occupied by a public safety annex building and Pedro’s Luggage and Brief Case Center, on a block ringed by apartments and condominiums, restaurants and the former grocery store. When they weren’t at loggerheads over financing and design, St. Paul Parks and Recreation worked closely with the Friends of Pedro Park and the St. Paul Parks Conservancy on the project, which was laid out on paper, in various concept iterations, as far back as the late 1990s.

The $7 million park project drew funding from state bonding dollars, city general funds, private fundraising and the city’s new 1% “Common Cent” sales tax, which was approved by voters in November 2023, the same year the annex building was demolished.

It also drew support from no shortage of gardeners, fundraising volunteers and community advocates, who kept hope alive over the decades that Pedro Park would become reality.

“There were 30 people out here on a Monday night planting annuals,” said conservancy director Michael-jon Pease to a sizable crowd huddled in the rain Thursday under the covered shelter. “People were emailing me, ‘When can I start weeding?’”

Senior residents of the Pointe and City Walk condominiums had advocated for a park in the center of the Fitzgerald neighborhood since the mid-1990s. The Fitzgerald Park “Park at the Heart” concept was included in the St. Paul Riverfront Corp.’s master plans for the area in 1997, and then the city’s comprehensive plan in 2006.

Pedro’s business was demolished in 2011, with the Pedro family gifting the underlying 0.45 acres of land to the city on the condition that it become greenspace within five years. Instead, facing a hefty maintenance backlog for Parks and Rec projects, the city planted flowers — a half-acre “urban flower field” — in sloping, recessed earth, creating a placeholder of sorts in 2014.

Then-Mayor Chris Coleman tried to convert the neighboring public safety annex building into modern office space in 2017, over the objection of neighbors who had expected to see the building eventually torn down to make room for Pedro Park. That year, during his first campaign for mayor, Carter seemed to embrace the idea of a full-sized park, but later promoted the development plans for modern office space proposed by the Ackerberg Group.

Legal action against the city filed by Pedro family member Marilyn Pitera and a group of downtown residents led into the pandemic and a national shift to remote work. Ackerberg eventually withdrew its plans, and the city and neighborhood residents went back to literal drawing boards, leaning on community surveys and a bevy of both public and private funds to finally move the new Pedro Park toward reality.

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By RIO YAMAT

The Trump administration said Thursday it is abandoning a Biden-era plan that sought to require airlines to compensate stranded passengers with cash, lodging and meals for flight cancellations or changes caused by a carrier.

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The proposed rule would have aligned U.S. policy more closely with European airline consumer protections. It was proposed last December in the final weeks of then-President Joe Biden’s administration, leaving its fate in the hands of his Republican successor.

In a document posted Thursday, President Donald Trump’s Transportation Department said its plan to scrap the proposed rule was “consistent with Department and administration priorities.”

Industry trade group Airlines for America, a vocal critic of the proposal, said it would have driven up ticket prices for consumers.

“We are encouraged by this Department of Transportation reviewing unnecessary and burdensome regulations that exceed its authority and don’t solve issues important to our customers,” the group said Thursday in a statement.

The proposed rule sought compensation starting at $200 when a flight is canceled or significantly delayed because of a mechanical problem with the plane or an airline computer outage. Compensation as high as $775 was proposed for delays of nine hours or more.

Airlines already promise some level of customer service when they cause flight cancellations or severe delays, but passengers usually have to ask for help at the airport, and airline promises don’t carry the weight of federal rules.

Biden’s Transportation Department was also considering free rebooking on the next available flight, including flights on rival airlines, as well as meals and lodging when passengers are stranded overnight. Many of the largest U.S. airlines already promise that kind of help when a delay or cancellation is their fault.

By MICHAEL CASEY

HAMPTON, N.H. (AP) — A New Hampshire teenager on a deep-sea fishing trip this week hauled in a 177-pound Atlantic halibut, a fish so big that it weighed more than him and could be a world record.

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Jackson Denio, a 13-year-old from Hampton, New Hampshire, was fishing about 100 miles off the New England Coast on Cashes Ledge Monday morning when he caught the fish.

“I think I screamed, honestly,” said Denio, who weighs around 120 pounds and is 5-foot-9-inches. “I don’t know exactly what happened, but I was very excited.”

Denio had set out on Sunday with about 30 others on an overnight charter trip with Al Gauron’s Deep Sea Fishing and Whale Watching. After everyone had caught plenty of pollock and other fish, Denio told the crew he wanted to catch a shark. They told him to fish at the bottom.

Minutes after he dropped his hook with pollock on it, Denio got a hit and knew he had something big.

Denio fought the fish for about 30 minutes, bringing it near the boat only to have it dive back down. He was eventually able to get the fish to the surface, guided by the crew and cheered on by fellow passengers who uttered plenty of oohs and ahhs spiced with profanity as the size of the fish became clear. One person even yelled out “Jackson, you are an angel of a man.”

“I’m standing there watching him. Then all of a sudden the fish took off it, bit it and started pounding away,” said Jim Walsh, the captain of the vessel that Denio was on. “I looked at him and I said, were you on the bottom? And he goes, yes. And I said, you don’t have a shark.”

Walsh said he was most impressed with Denio’s composure.

“He did not let go once. He never let anybody else touch the rod. And he worked him, worked him. Then eventually, the fish starts to tire out,” Walsh said. “Even though he’s that big, they go to tire. Then he got it up to the surface. That’s when we looked and went Oh my God. We were all ecstatic.”

Before the fish was carved up, Denio officially got it weighed and took photos and video of the fish, and he has provided other information about his fishing gear that will go into an application for a world record with the International Game Fish Association. The family plans to file an application under the junior record for Atlantic halibut and one under line class that includes all fish.

The association didn’t respond to a request for more information. Its website lists as vacant the record for Atlantic halibut under the junior male class.

And while he is relishing all the attention, Denio is itching get back out on the water again — and catch something even bigger.

“It makes me want to keep fishing even more and try and beat the record if I can,” he said.