Enormous Ice Block Breaks Off Greenland Glacier

A 100-square-mile block of ice 600 feet thick has calved off one of the largest ocean-bordering glaciers in Greenland. The Arctic hasn’t lost a chunk of ice that big since 1962.

“In the early morning hours of August 5, an ice island four times the size of Manhattan was born in northern Greenland,” oceanographer Andreas Muenchow of University of Delaware said in a press release August 6. “The freshwater stored in this ice island could keep the Delaware or Hudson rivers flowing for more than two years. It could also keep all U.S. public tap water flowing for 120 days.”

Petermann glacier is located about 600 miles south of the North Pole. Muenchow and a team of scientists have been studying it since 2003. They had been expecting the glacier to calve, but this piece is much larger than anyone had expected.

The glacier lost about one-quarter of its 43-mile long floating ice-shelf.