Behold, the floating ice island
By Kieran Mulvaney, Discovery News
The trawler’s crew could scarcely believe their eyes.
They had seen icebergs before as they fished off the coast of Labrador, but never anything quite like this, what was described as “a dazzling white ice island five kilometres long and alive with mountains, valleys, brooks, waterfalls, ponds and seals.”
A short video (linked at the bottom) that they took of the “floating ice city” was for a while trending on YouTube, and for good reason: Although the clip is short, it is long enough to demonstrate the immensity of the expanse of ice stretching in front of the camera.
Two years ago, I was communicating every day with another ship that was monitoring that same expanse of ice; but back then, the ice was where it was supposed to be — as part of Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland, one of the northernmost glaciers in the world.
I was coordinating a tour of Greenland and the ice edge near Svalbard for Greenpeace, which was providing its ship Arctic Sunrise to researchers as a platform to study the impacts of a warming world on a changing Arctic.
The tour began off Petermann, where the crew worked with a science team led by Jason Box of the Byrd Polar Research Center at The Ohio State University, who had been watching Petermann closely for years.
- Link to article and video: http://news.discovery.com/earth/behold-the-floating-ice-island-110715.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1
