Following on the story earlier today about glacial earthquakes, you totally need to check out Jason Amundson's videos of Jakobshavn glacier breaking up in June of last year. The ice breaking up in these vids is so huge and so heavy that as it rotates (center of the picture) and begins drifting out to sea, it literally makes the earth shake to the tune of a magnitude 5.0 (or so) earthquake.
The sound you hear is the actual sound the berg made as it scraped over the fjord bottom -- Amundson sped up the seismic recording 25 times to make it audible.
Several kilometers of ice shearing off the Greenland ice sheet is always awesome to behold, and the few thousand folks living down-fjord of Jakobshavn agree; ice-induced tsunamis regularly crash ashore in Ilulissat Harbor, 50 kilometers away from the glacier's edge. A phenomenon they've dubbed 'kaneling.'
Rest assured, though, these waves are usually just 1/2 meter high or less when they arrive in the harbor, and they're mostly harmless...mostly.
This is a slightly more dangerous version of an ice-tsunami. And yes, that there at the end of the video, that's a couple of guys in a little boat fleeing for their lives:
Sources: Jason Amundson, University of Alaska, Fairbanks and Ilulissat Kommuneat
Recent Comments