The video is 20 times actual speed. The calving event took 10 minutes. The researchers, David Holland and Denise Holland, estimate the calved iceberg was more than 1 kilometer tall, making it twice the height of the Empire State Building.
Here’s a description of the research from Denise Holland of New York University:
The problem of global sea level rise is one of the most often cited potential large impacts of global climate change over the coming century. Within the problem of sea level rise itself, the most difficult aspect to deal with from a future projection point of view is the physical process of glacier calving. This process is poorly understood due to a lack of physical observations, a consequence of the difficult and dangerous nature of the calving process in which massive pieces of ice are transferred from the land to the ocean. In order to obtain measurements of calving we therefore use remote sensing techniques, which include both radar and seismic instrumentation. An interferometric radar pointed at the glacier front provides measurements of the surface velocity of the glacier at very short intervals. A broadband seismic array surrounding the glacier front provides information on glacier fracturing beneath the surface. These observations are being collected in our project over a period of several years as we build up a statistical database of calving events. Hopefully this data set will give us insight into how and why calving occurs so that we can create a parameterization to be used in climate models that includes glaciers and their calving. This will lead to more robust projections of sea level rise than is currently possible.
NYU’s Center for Atmosphere Ocean Science (CAOS) at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
http://caos.cims.nyu.edu/page/research
