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Stunning new video shows the giant ice cap that shaped the Scottish landscape during the last ice age, and it looks like something Game Of Thrones.
The film recreates what the 0.6 mile thick (1 kilometer) glacier atop the modern city of Dundee would have looked like. The glacier overlooks the city as the Game Of Thrones The series’ huge wall of ice dominates the Castle Black fortress.
Kieran Duncan, senior lecturer in communication design at the University of Dundee in Scotland, created the video with Max Van Wyk de Vries, glaciologist at the University of Minnesota.
They included Dundee Law Hill, 571 feet (174 meters) high, a local Dundee landmark about as high as the Washington Monument (555 feet or 169 m high), to illustrate the size of the glacier.
“Part of the film shows what a 1 km ice cap would have looked like above the [Dundee] Law, and I remember being blown away when Max first told me about it, ”Duncan said in a statement.
“You hear numbers like that, but it’s only when you see what it would have looked like in relation to something like the Law, which dominates the city, that you really begin to realize how massive this glacier was.”
Related: In Photos: The Endangered Glaciers of the European Alps
Glaciers covered Dundee and most of the British Isles 20,000 years ago, towards the end of the last Ice Age (around 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). As the Earth warmed again around 15,000 years ago, glaciers retreated and carved out features in the landscape, such as Dundee’s Law, the statement said.
Van Wyk de Vries decided to find out more about Scotland’s past when he visited his girlfriend in Dundee last March and was unable to return home to the United States due to a COVID-19 lockdown. The couple began to explore Dundee and the surrounding area for exercise.
(Kieran J. Duncan)
Above: A clip from the video comparing the height of the glacier to Dundee today.
“It made me think of those beautiful landscapes and how they were shaped by flowing ice,” said Van Wyk de Vries.
To find details about the glacier, he scanned scientific papers, local data, and ice models. He also examined satellite images of modern Greenland glaciers.
Van Wyk de Vries then received public engagement funding from the British Society for Geomorphology and partnered with Duncan to visualize his work.
The 3-minute film uses animated visualization techniques, film footage and time-lapse videos to bring the ancient Dundee Glacier to life.
It was released on YouTube on September 6 and is part of the “Time and Tide” exhibition at McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery and Museum until October 3.
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