Photo: AP / European Space Agency
An iceberg continued to drift closer to a Greenland village and is so large the European Space Agency could see the threat from space on Tuesday, according to ABC News.
The ESA released an image which showed the giant iceberg floating off the coast of Innaarssuit.
More than 180 village residents have already been evacuated to higher ground after the 11-million-ton iceberg slowly drifted to the shore, prompting fears that it could break apart and produce waves large enough they could level low-lying buildings in the town.
Local outlet Kalaalit Nunaat Radio (KNR) said chunks of ice were falling off into the sea from the iceberg which was creating massive waves since last week.
"There are 180 inhabitants and we are very concerned and are afraid," said Karl Petersen, chair for the local council in the island of Innaarsuit.
Peterson said Greenland's emergency responders were monitoring the iceberg with the help of the Danish Royal Navy, who had a ship standing by to help assess the situation.
"We fear the iceberg could calve and send a flood towards the village," Lina Davidsen, a security chief at the Greenland police, told Danish news agency Ritzau on Friday.
Peterson said local officials were hopeful a strong wind would be able to dislodge the grounded iceberg and drive it further out to sea.
The image captured by ESA on July 9 came from the Sentinel-2 satellites and revealed several other large icebergs in the area.
KNR also published video taken by a local resident which showed a time-lapse of the iceberg drifting by the village.
Last summer, four people died after an iceberg created massive waves which flooded a similar coastal settlement in northwest Greenland.
But the community's power plant is located near the ocean so authorities were focused their energy on that area since large waves could be disastrous for the community's only source of energy.
Scientists working with New York University captured the four-mile iceberg first breaking off a glacier in Greenland.
NYU said the process known as calving caused nearby sea levels to dramatically increase and is a major cause of rising sea levels around the world.
“Global sea-level rise is both undeniable and consequential,” said David Holland, a professor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematics and NYU Abu Dhabi, who led the research team. “By capturing how it unfolds, we can see, firsthand, its breathtaking significance.”
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"The better we understand what’s going on means we can create more accurate simulations to help predict and plan for climate change," said fellow NYU scientist Denise Holland.
Last year, a giant iceberg split off from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica which was the size of Delaware.
A few months later, another massive iceberg calved from Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier before that disintegrated into even smaller icebergs which scientists said was a departure from typical behavior.
"We’re now seeing changes in the calving behavior of the ice shelf, when for 68 years we saw a pattern of advance and retreat resulting in the calving of a single large iceberg which left the ice front to approximately the same place,” British Antarctic Survey marine geophysicist Robert Larter said in a statement in November 2017.
-WN.com, Maureen Foody
