A giant iceberg parked offshore. It's beautiful, but the villagers take the road.



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Dozens of people have moved inside a remote Greenland village, fearing that a huge iceberg could collapse and send a wave of flooding on the colony

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Innaarsuit, on the west coast of Greenland. The iceberg rises to about 300 feet above the water level. Credit Scanpix Denmark / Reuters

It was a startling sight: a huge iceberg looming above a tiny village in the Arctic. Ice is omnipresent along the Greenland coast, but this giant has put the inhabitants of the village, Innaarsuit, population 169, to the test.

Locals fear that part of the iceberg will plummet into the ocean and spark a huge wave. Big icebergs do not always melt politely in the ocean. They tend to separate dramatically. "This is not a peaceful process," said Joerg Schaefer, a research scientist in climatology at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.

Thirty-three people were evacuated further inland. People have also been advised to put their boats out of the way. "They are losing their boats, they can no longer hunt or fish," said Gideon Quist, a police inspector in Nuuk, the capital.

The iceberg is the largest the villagers have seen, said a local council member from Greenland. national radio. Satellite data indicated that it measured about 650 feet wide, rose nearly 300 feet in the air and weighed up to 11 million tonnes, an expert said. Danish Meteorological Institute at DR, the Danish broadcaster

. region, Inspector Quist said, what's causing trouble is that it has become entrenched.

Officials hoped that southerly winds and high tides would lift the iceberg and move it away from the village

According to Dr. Schaefer, the number of icebergs released in the US ocean should increase at least over the next few decades.

Last year, a tsunami devastated another village on the west coast of Greenland. Four people died. This wave of flooding was caused by the collapse of a nearby mountain flank in the sea.

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