This Video Captured a Massive Iceberg Breaking off a Glacier

It was half the size of Manhattan.

The calving front of the Helheim glacier.NASA/Wallops

This story was originally published by Atlas Obscura and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

This past June, late one night, a team of scientists camped out on a fjord in Greenland heard a roar. When icebergs are born, they fill the ocean with noise, and the Helheim Glacier was cracking. The researchers saw, LiveScience reports, “puffs of ice” tossed into the air as a new iceberg began to break off from the glacier. They began filming, and the result is here, a sped-up version of an iceberg calving:

In real time, it took 30 minutes for an iceberg four miles long to break off and float away into the sea. It’s hard to get a sense of scale from the video, but the researchers pointed out in a statement that this iceberg would cover most of Lower and Midtown Manhattan. It’s a tabular iceberg, long and flat; in the video, you can also see tall, thin pinnacle icebergs crack off and flip over.

Helheim Glacier, named after Hel, the Viking realm of the dead, is the fastest flowing glacier on the eastern side of the Greenland Ice Sheet, NASA says. But even though the icebergs tossed into the sea here are contributing to sea level rise, scientists still don’t know exactly how such break-ups work. “The calving process itself is relatively poorly observed, understood, and modeled,” wrote David Holland, one of the scientists who captured the video, in a 2016 paper. This video captures data about calving events that can be used to better understand break-ups like these.

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“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

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Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

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