Sunday, December 16, 2012

Iceberg!


An iceberg's seismic breakup, believed to be the largest ever caught on camera, is described by the person who filmed it as the equivalent of watching "Manhattan... breaking apart in front of your eyes."
Filmmaker Jason Balog recorded the spectacular calving event while making his documentary "Chasing Ice" about global climate change. He had set up his camera on Greenland's Ilulissat Glacier, which has retreated approximately 10 miles in the last 12 years.
Balog figures almost 2 cubic miles worth of the Ilulissat broke up over the course of 75 minutes.
"Pieces of ice were shooting up out of the ocean 600 feet and then falling," he says in the film, which contains bass-thumping audio that makes it almost as impressive to listen to as watch.
"The only way you can really put it into scale with human reference is if you imagine Manhattan, and all of a sudden all of those buildings just start to rumble and quake and peel off and just fall over and fall over and roll around."


2 comments:

Mary Christine said...

Wow. that was amazing - and scary.

Syd said...

More and more of this will be happening and it will likely have dire consequences. Not of the Mayan kind though--at least not by Dec. 21.