A giant iceberg breaks off in Greenland. The live video
Environment — di Andrea Barolini
The dramatic calving of an iceberg six kilometres long was filmed live in Greenland by a group of American researchers.
A giant iceberg breaks off in Greenland. The live video
The dramatic calving of an iceberg six kilometres long was filmed live in Greenland by a group of American researchers.
Ten billion tonnes lost in the space of a few minutes. The cameras of Denise Holland, head of the Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at New York University, captured a dramatic environmental event that took place on 22 June 2018.
An enormous iceberg, six kilometres wide and 1.6 kilometres long, with a depth of 800 metres, broke off from the Helheim Glacier in Greenland. American researchers have been observing the area for a decade and decided to publish a time-lapse of the event (which lasted half an hour) to offer the world evidence of what is happening in the Arctic region as a result of global warming.
A #Manhattan with ice: @NYUScience captures breaking of glacier in #Greenland to form #iceberg of #BigApple proportions (video): ow.ly/K32D30kRtPO #Climatechange
The goal of iceberg research: predicting what will happen in Antarctica
The iceberg alone accounts for around three per cent of all the ice in Greenland that will end up in the sea over the course of 2018. Nevertheless, as the researchers themselves have pointed out, witnessing a similar phenomenon live remains extremely rare. Holland explained to the Washington Post that the aim of collecting the footage is to try to understand how the situation might develop in another area of the planet, far larger: Antarctica. "The simplest thing," the scientist said, "is to understand what happens here in order to try to predict, through simulations, the effects of climate change on a large scale."