10 Billion Tons Of Ice From Greenland's Helheim Glacier Drop Into The Sea In 30 Minutes - Video

[hatrack]

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The vast expanse of Helheim Glacier shows crevasses filled with meltwater. Helheim is one of Greenland’s largest and fastest-melting glaciers.

A new video has surfaced that documents an enormous calving event at the rapidly retreating Helheim Glacier in SE Greenland last month. The horrifying event shows massive ice columns, ½ mile thick, breaking off from one of the largest ice streams in Greenland along it’s entire 4.5 mile long ice front.

The observable ice of Helheim’s marine extension which towers over the ocean is 100 yards tall or roughly the size of a 10 story building or a football field. That is just a tiny fraction of the enormity of this glacier’s full vertical extent notes Chris Mooney of the Washington Post. He observes that the video captures the “already-floating” parts detach and begin to flow away from the front, while the “thicker sections” of Helheim that rest on the bedrock of the seafloor, “detach, lift up and tip backward as they float to the surface”.

This event portends even more dangerous sea-level rise for the world’s coastal cities as whatever resistance the marine ice extension of Helheim provided in holding back the land ice is now gone. The arctic is warming 2-3 times faster than the rest of the planet.

The calving event was recorded by Denise Holland, the field and logistics manager for New York University’s Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and NYU Abu Dhabi’s Center for Global Sea Level Change.

EDIT

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/7/10/1779360/-In-just-30-minutes-Greenland-s-Helheim-Glacier-lost-10-billion-tons-of-ice-to-the-ocean

[mahatmakanejeeves]

1. Watch 10 billion tons of ice fall into the ocean

Same thing; different source.

Energy and Environment

Watch 10 billion tons of ice fall into the ocean

By Chris Mooney July 9 at 2:27 PM [link:[e-mail]|Email the author]

{snip the video}

An enormous, four-mile-long iceberg break, or “calving” event, swept across Greenland’s massive Helheim Glacier last month, a new video has revealed.

The event, in which roughly half-mile-high columns of ice break free and tip onto their backs — and later collide downstream and shatter further — was filmed by Denise Holland, the field and logistics manager for New York University’s Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and NYU Abu Dhabi’s Center for Global Sea Level Change. The event took about 30 minutes. The video above has been sped up to capture the entire event in under two minutes.

During the summer in Greenland, breaks from glaciers are common but rarely so large. According to NYU, the area of floating ice created here “would stretch from Lower Manhattan up to Midtown in New York City.”

The total amount of ice that fell into the ocean was about 10 billion tons, as the break rippled across the entirety of the glacier’s ice face in half-mile-deep water, said David Holland, a glaciologist at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematics and NYU Abu Dhabi, and head of the research team. ... “It’s a complete scene of chaos from berg formation,” David Holland said. “Everything possible to happen happened.”
....

Chris Mooney covers climate change, energy, and the environment. He has reported from the 2015 Paris climate negotiations, the Northwest Passage, and the Greenland ice sheet, among other locations, and has written four books about science, politics and climate change. Follow https://twitter.com/chriscmooney

[Nitram]

2. Thanks, jeeves, this video is clearer, especially on full screen.

Awesome event.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

3. Videos at the WaPo don't have a built-in way of easily linking.

There's no "copy URL of video" option. Sometimes you have to go to Youtube and find them there.

On the bright side, this means oceanfront property in Charlottesville.

Thanks for the thanks.

[nonviolence9]

4. thank you for posting this

Thank you. May our world act in time to save it

[Delphinus]

5. Welcome to DU,

nonviolence9. Good to have you here.