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.
Helheim Glacier, with its characteristic wishbone-shaped channels, as seen from about 20,000 feet in the sky. Credit: NASA/Operation IceBridge.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.