A massive chunk of the Grey Glacier’s ice-sheet has broken off and displayed a stunning spectacle in Southern Patagonia, Chile. The Grey Glacier is part of the ‘Southern Patagonian Ice Field,’ which at about 16,800 square kilometres is the world’s second-largest contiguous extrapolar ice field1 and the largest freshwater reservoir in South America.
According to the video description:
The Grey Glacier is famous for insane glacier wall collapses during the summer when large icebergsare breaking off the glacier and collapsing into the water of the ‘Lago Grey’. In the right time of the year big blocks of ice break off the glacier and drop into the water. The waves created by such glacier calving events often splash dozens of meters through the air. The glacier itself is about 6 km (3.7 mi) wide and has an average height of over 30 m (100 ft) above the surface of the water.
If we take into account that just one-tenth of the volume of an iceberg is above water, that would mean that the whole chunk that collapsed is about 300m long!
- First being the southeastern Alaska’s approximately 25,000 square kilometer Kluane / Wrangell–St. Elias / Glacier Bay / Tatshenshini-Alsek Ice Field ↩︎