On June 22, 2018 a team of scientists from NYU captured an iceberg the size of Manhattan calving off the Helheim Glacier in Greenland over a duration of 30 minutes. The four mile wide, one mile across, and half mile thick chunk of ice weighed roughly 10 billion tons.
According to an article in National Geographic:
This event in itself isn’t necessarily a harbinger of climate doom. “Calving happens,” says Kristin Poinar, a glaciologist from the University of Buffalo. “Ice isn’t a good building material—you could never build a skyscraper out of it because it collapses under its own weight if it’s more than 90 meters tall.” And at the very edge of the Helheim Glacier, the wall of ice is about 70 meters (about 230 feet) tall. So pieces break off as a natural part of the glacier mass balance cycle that would happen with or without climate change.
