Ice in Motion
As frozen lands disintegrate, researchers rush to catch the collapse
Jason Box spent the summer of 2009 waiting for Greenland’s Petermann Glacier to break apart. Everything signaled the glacier was ready to go. Melt ponds were pooling on its surface, and massive cracks were opening on the icy tongue that stretched offshore into Baffin Bay. Box, a glaciologist at Ohio State University in Columbus, spent two months on a ship, his cameras trained on the volatile edge where ice meets ocean. He was determined to catch Petermann in the act.
As luck would have it, the glacier held out one more year. When Box wasn’t looking, on August 4, 2010, a piece of ice four times the size of Manhattan broke off. It was the largest iceberg to calve in the Arctic since 1962.
The world’s frozen places are full of glaciers like Petermann, slow-moving rivers of ice flowing into the ocean and poised on the edge between stability and collapse. In recent years, many of these volatile glaciers have spit out more and more chunks of ice to float away as icebergs and then melt. The more icebergs a glacier discharges, the faster it tends to move, thin and retreat away from the coast.