One question...
how many gin an tonics worth of ice is that?
It's a well-known fact that volumes of water are described in terms of Olympic-sized swimming pools, while running H2O is quantified in elephants per second, but have you ever wondered just what is the official standard for large bodies of ice? Well wonder no more, because ScienceDaily has the answer. According to this report …
so such a standard of comparison is useless. How big is it compared to more familiar islands? Flat Holm? Jersey? Isle of Wight? Isle of Man? Ireland?
Some other suggested standards:
Gniesenau/Scharnhorst (i.e. it could pass through the English Channel)
Severn Barrage (i.e. it could not get further up the Severn than a line between Lavernock and Brean Down)
Manhattens have been in use common use since at least 2002 when the Ross Ice Shelf calved a large berg, C-18. "The new iceberg measures roughly 47 miles by 4.6 miles (76 km by 7 km), or almost ten times the area of Manhattan."- CNN May 2002
But Science Daily in it's recent article used the words "about equal" which is as imprecise as CNN's "almost".
Descriptions of the massive berg B-15, calved from the Ross Ice Shelf in 2000, introduced the unit "Connecticut" (from US National Science Foundation, NSF PR 00-12 - March 22, 2000, "nearly as large") . This was also, sadly, not a precise calibration.
Hence, while the Manhatten is in common use, (a) the Connecticut is the official unit for icebergs being mentioned first (March 2000) by a legitimate scientific source and (b) neither unit is fully calibrated as the precision has not been quantified at 273.16 K. Time for SI adjudication.
In earlier days (long before ISO), experiments with X-ray sources the radiation strength was quantified as so many 'Gillett’s'. One Gillett being the level needed to just pass through a standard razor blade. Stronger sources were measured using a staggered stack of blades on a photographic plate and the strength determined by counting the shadows.
Cutting-edge eh?