45 comments

  • atbpaca 5 hours ago ago

    Beautiful and scary at the same time. Almost like the iceberg was a planet on its own with mountains, valleys, crevices. Then everything goes haywire. The fall of a majestic titan. The destruction of a world.

    • baubino 4 hours ago ago

      There’s also something very organic about it. I had to keep reminding myself that it’s “just ice” and not a living being.

      • dotancohen 3 hours ago ago

        Especially the spine. If you had shown me a portion of the video with that thing moving as such, I would have believed it to be some leviathan.

        Which brings us to the video itself - horrible. Presumably the original sound was recorded, because we hear it under the music. Just let us hear the sound! The people watching this video are people who appreciate nature, not people who need a dramatic soundtrack to be entertained.

        And what is with changing the speed of the video every 60 seconds? Either show it at real speed, or speed it up, but not both intermittently! At first I thought there was an issue with the video playback hanging.

        I would absolutely love to watch the original, unedited source.

    • GuB-42 5 hours ago ago

      In short, a titanic event...

  • joshuat 5 hours ago ago

    Massive appreciation for whoever adjusted the position of the camera at 7:23 (3:18 in video)

  • raphinou 5 hours ago ago

    I would have thought it would generate enormous wave, but that's clearly not the case. I think some of the biggest waves was generated by a mountain sliding or collapsing in the sea. I expected something similar here. Anyone know why not?

    • GuB-42 5 hours ago ago

      It is not a very energetic event for its size. The iceberg is floating, it can't accumulate a lot of potential energy before flipping, so when it happens, there is not enough to make big waves. The center of gravity of the iceberg barely moves.

      A mountain sliding into the sea is different, these higher up rocks have a lot of potential energy, that convert into kinetic energy as they fall, which is transferred to the water as they splash down, making big waves.

    • cucumber3732842 5 hours ago ago

      The amount of water actually being displaced isn't changing much, it's just kind of rearranging around where is water and where is ice.

    • javier2 5 hours ago ago

      i suppose its not actually displacing a lot of water volume, unlike a landslide.

    • staplers 5 hours ago ago

      All its mass is already on the water so it's not displacing anything. It probably made some splashes but it seems like a fairly round object rotating rather than smashing into anything

    • dist-epoch 5 hours ago ago

      Maybe because ice floats, and it's almost the same density as water?

  • nomilk 5 hours ago ago

    Surprised the bottom of the iceberg crumbled so easily (like sand) at 4m 16s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UufMqwyO7pY&t=4m16s

    I'd have assumed it would be colder and more compacted (being toward the bottom and further under water), and therefore harder.

    • amszmidt 4 hours ago ago

      How cold is cold? :-)

      Water below ”sea” level tends to stay around -1C (salt water) to 4C. Below that, water becomes ice…

      Ambient temperature can drop to -40C … internally these ice blocks hoover around -10C.

    • FromHoiPolloi 5 hours ago ago

      My take would be that underwater temps cannot get below freezing. So the surrounding temperatures above water can be lower than under water.

      • Pooge 4 hours ago ago

        > My take would be that underwater temps cannot get below freezing

        Yep, density of water changes with temperature—it's the only thing that has that phenomenon—and therefore the colder water is always at the surface. That's actually what made life possible since life could survive despite a frozen surface.

        Happy to be proven wrong, but that's what I learnt making cocktails and investigating clear ice :)

        • dotancohen 3 hours ago ago

          Lots of things change density when temperature changes. Water is unique that below 4°C, it gets less dense as it cools - and that trend continues even through the phase change. That's why, as you mention, ice floats, and the surface freezes first, and fish can live below a frozen surface.

          • Pooge 3 hours ago ago

            > it gets less dense as it cools

            Right!! Thanks for correcting me.

      • nh23423fefe 5 hours ago ago

        plus thermal conductivity of water vs atmosphere

      • mrloopex 4 hours ago ago

        Freezing point of water changes with salinity and impurities. By definition a liquid cannot be below its freezing point until it has completed its phase change.

        • RetroTechie 2 hours ago ago

          > By definition a liquid cannot be below its freezing point until it has completed its phase change.

          Supercooled water is a thing: (and I've seen it a few times myself)

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling

        • FromHoiPolloi 4 hours ago ago

          Yes. My point was that it's easier(?) to get below freezing point above water than below. So while the cold air keeps the upper part of the iceberg (relatively) intact - it will slowly melt below the sea until the center of gravity changes enough to flip over.

  • eamag 5 hours ago ago

    Crazy how the most liked comment under the video as of now discusses AI video generation

    • saalweachter 3 hours ago ago

      The music also gets talked about quite a bit.

      My immediate reaction to a "what is with this loud music, I can barely hear the actual audio" comment on YouTube was to assume the channel was afraid of being copystruck by the iceberg's lawyers.

    • maxlin 5 hours ago ago

      Especially as physics-oriented and long videos are exactly the kinds that are easiest to figure if they're AI.

      Artificial Intelligence isn't the issue. Natural Stupidity is.

  • hk__2 5 hours ago ago

    I felt like watching a big animal moving

    • troyvit 4 hours ago ago

      Yeah there were parts that were so organic it looked alive. I was imagining the folks at Toho taking detailed notes.

  • ilamont 2 hours ago ago

    Can more experienced people describe how to verify this video as non-AI generated? Is there a scientific source in Greenland or Denmark that tracks such incidents? Or could satellite passes before vs after confirm what happened?

  • xnx 4 hours ago ago

    Anyone who enjoys that video (I did!) should watch the largest glacier calving ever recorded: https://youtu.be/hC3VTgIPoGU

  • Jeremy1026 2 hours ago ago

    Nice of the iceberg to float into frame before decided to do it's gymnastics routine.

  • quercusa 3 hours ago ago
  • moffkalast 23 minutes ago ago

    Gotta say, I haven't seen anything this jawdropping in a long while.

  • thisisauserid 5 hours ago ago

    It stops first? Maybe the bottom hit the seafloor?

    • dotancohen 3 hours ago ago

      That's what I thought too. The sudden stop is actually two phenomenon compounded. One, the mountain of ice contacts bottom. Two, the video speed changes from ~8x to 1x.

    • readthenotes1 5 hours ago ago

      One of the comments said just that. "Grounded near disko bay" iirc.

      Another comment said that icebergs melt blow water faster than in the air and that flipping is a fairly common thing to do because the center of gravity changes.

      • maxbond 5 hours ago ago

        You can see bathtub rings on the underside as it's lifted up. The rings are caused by it's melting faster under the water than in the air, so there's a discontinuity at the waterline.

  • tristramb 2 hours ago ago

    Reminds me of a 'mimoid' from Stanisław Lem's Solaris.

  • pixl97 5 hours ago ago

    4:40, so this is where people came up with the idea for Godzilla.

  • jcranmer 5 hours ago ago

    Honestly, my first thought watching this video is "I want a root beer float." Something in the way the icefalls as the iceberg is flipping over just makes me think of that...

  • csnizik 5 hours ago ago

    Structural review clearly got skipped. Somebody is losing their job over this.

  • catlikesshrimp 6 hours ago ago

    I would have described flipping it over before collapsing. The title seems a clickbait, but is no quite that. Keep in mind that most of the iceberg is off camera, as shown during the first minutes. It lost 80% or 90% of its total mass but most of it isn't seen until the end, when the iceberg goes back to the right.

  • maxlin 5 hours ago ago

    now that's epic!

  • rlam2x51 5 hours ago ago

    I was expecting more waves. I am wondering if this video was AI generated. I hate that it is so hard to trust your eyes nowadays…

    Edit: Did a quick background check, video seems legit.