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A monumental iceberg floats dangerously close to a Greenlandic community whose residents fear a devastating tsunami if the ice mountain breaks during hot weather.
People close to the nearest bank of the 11 million ton berg were evacuated. higher up in the remote village of Innaarsuit on Friday. A rescue helicopter was parked nearby
"We are concerned that the iceberg may calve" – break – and "send a flood to the village," Greenland police spokesman Lina Davidsen told reporters. the Danish press agency Ritzau. Icebergs over 170 feet on the west coast of the country. A video posted on Twitter shows a piece of ice breaking the massive block and diving into the sea, sending big waves that wrap around the shore.
"It's a bit like if you live in the suburbs, and you woke up one morning and looked out, and there was a skyscraper next to your house ", said the co-historian of the University of New York, David Holland, at NPR. "I'll be the first to get out of there."
The locals are used to big icebergs, but "it's the biggest we've seen," said Susanne Eliassen, a village council member, at the local Sermitsiaq newspaper. . "And there are cracks and holes that make us worry about being able to calve anytime."
Four people died last summer after waves from an earthquake swept through a colony in northwestern Greenland.
This year has been a significant melt season in Greenland, another that seems to be joining the growing list of the warmest years of the globe recorded in the era of climate change.
William Colgan, senior researcher at the Geological Survey A study from Denmark and Greenland told Agence France Presse that the risk of tsunamis would increase as more icebergs emerged from the climate.
"The production of icebergs in Greenland has increased over the past 100 years." He said.
David Holland was part of a group of NYU scientists who published a video in June showing the dramatic moment when a four-mile iceberg detached from a glacier in the # East of Greenland.
The biggest event we have seen in more than a decade in Greenland, "he told the Associated Press.
The video was taken by his wife, Denise Holland, of the Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of the University. The couple had camped for several weeks on the Helheim Glacier to collect data to project sea level changes caused by global warming.
Watch the time-lapse video below:
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