It’s iceberg season in the eastern province of Newfoundland and while it is common for these floating mountains of ice to roll over, it is rarer to capture it on video.
Jackie Dooley was on a boat trip on the back side of Bell Island in Conception Bay last week. It’s a great spot to view icebergs which have broken off Greenland and float down the Atlantic Ocean past Canadian shores.
“We visited a beautiful iceberg today…We circled to get some pictures and heard a loud crack and a large chunk of ice fell from the iceberg,” said Dooley. “Shortly after, the iceberg began to roll.”
Icebergs tend to become unstable and capsize when their height exceeds their horizontal dimensions. Research suggests that depending on the size of the iceberg, a rollover can emit energy as large as that of an earthquake of magnitude five to six on the Richter scale. If it’s big enough the energy could even cause a tsunami, say researchers.
This iceberg was not that big, but it was impressive.
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