- Beautiful and scary at the same time. Almost like the iceberg was a planet on its own with mountains, valleys, crevices. Then everything goes haywire. The fall of a majestic titan. The destruction of a world.
- There’s also something very organic about it. I had to keep reminding myself that it’s “just ice” and not a living being.
- Especially the spine. If you had shown me a portion of the video with that thing moving as such, I would have believed it to be some leviathan.
Which brings us to the video itself - horrible. Presumably the original sound was recorded, because we hear it under the music. Just let us hear the sound! The people watching this video are people who appreciate nature, not people who need a dramatic soundtrack to be entertained.
And what is with changing the speed of the video every 60 seconds? Either show it at real speed, or speed it up, but not both intermittently! At first I thought there was an issue with the video playback hanging.
I would absolutely love to watch the original, unedited source.
- > I would absolutely love to watch the original, unedited source.
From the linked video's info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ5PhjFYRSo
- In short, a titanic event...
- Massive appreciation for whoever adjusted the position of the camera at 7:23 (3:18 in video)
- I would have thought it would generate enormous wave, but that's clearly not the case. I think some of the biggest waves was generated by a mountain sliding or collapsing in the sea. I expected something similar here. Anyone know why not?
- It is not a very energetic event for its size. The iceberg is floating, it can't accumulate a lot of potential energy before flipping, so when it happens, there is not enough to make big waves. The center of gravity of the iceberg barely moves.
A mountain sliding into the sea is different, these higher up rocks have a lot of potential energy, that convert into kinetic energy as they fall, which is transferred to the water as they splash down, making big waves.
- The amount of water actually being displaced isn't changing much, it's just kind of rearranging around where is water and where is ice.
- i suppose its not actually displacing a lot of water volume, unlike a landslide.
- All its mass is already on the water so it's not displacing anything. It probably made some splashes but it seems like a fairly round object rotating rather than smashing into anything
- Maybe because ice floats, and it's almost the same density as water?
- Surprised the bottom of the iceberg crumbled so easily (like sand) at 4m 16s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UufMqwyO7pY&t=4m16s
I'd have assumed it would be colder and more compacted (being toward the bottom and further under water), and therefore harder.
- How cold is cold? :-)
Water below ”sea” level tends to stay around -1C (salt water) to 4C. Below that, water becomes ice…
Ambient temperature can drop to -40C … internally these ice blocks hoover around -10C.
- My take would be that underwater temps cannot get below freezing. So the surrounding temperatures above water can be lower than under water.
- > My take would be that underwater temps cannot get below freezing
Yep, density of water changes with temperature—it's the only thing that has that phenomenon—and therefore the colder water is always at the surface. That's actually what made life possible since life could survive despite a frozen surface.
Happy to be proven wrong, but that's what I learnt making cocktails and investigating clear ice :)
- Lots of things change density when temperature changes. Water is unique that below 4°C, it gets less dense as it cools - and that trend continues even through the phase change. That's why, as you mention, ice floats, and the surface freezes first, and fish can live below a frozen surface.
- > it gets less dense as it cools
Right!! Thanks for correcting me.
- plus thermal conductivity of water vs atmosphere
- Freezing point of water changes with salinity and impurities. By definition a liquid cannot be below its freezing point until it has completed its phase change.
- > By definition a liquid cannot be below its freezing point until it has completed its phase change.
Supercooled water is a thing: (and I've seen it a few times myself)
- Does that mean every TTT diagram is wrong?
- Superheating, too, and that's something that can happen in a microwave, occasionally causing severe burns when superheated water flash boils. AFAIU, it's the same phenomenon--lack of nucleation sites to kick-off the phase transition.
- Yes. My point was that it's easier(?) to get below freezing point above water than below. So while the cold air keeps the upper part of the iceberg (relatively) intact - it will slowly melt below the sea until the center of gravity changes enough to flip over.
- Crazy how the most liked comment under the video as of now discusses AI video generation
- The music also gets talked about quite a bit.
My immediate reaction to a "what is with this loud music, I can barely hear the actual audio" comment on YouTube was to assume the channel was afraid of being copystruck by the iceberg's lawyers.
- Especially as physics-oriented and long videos are exactly the kinds that are easiest to figure if they're AI.
Artificial Intelligence isn't the issue. Natural Stupidity is.
- Anyone who enjoys that video (I did!) should watch the largest glacier calving ever recorded: https://youtu.be/hC3VTgIPoGU
- Can more experienced people describe how to verify this video as non-AI generated? Is there a scientific source in Greenland or Denmark that tracks such incidents? Or could satellite passes before vs after confirm what happened?
- It is the work of but a moment to check for trustworthy sources. It's sad that this skill seems to have been lost.
https://eu-space.europa.eu/components/earth-observation-cope...
- Nice of the iceberg to float into frame before decided to do it's gymnastics routine.
- A fun game to draw your own iceberg: https://joshdata.me/iceberger.html
- It stops first? Maybe the bottom hit the seafloor?
- That's what I thought too. The sudden stop is actually two phenomenon compounded. One, the mountain of ice contacts bottom. Two, the video speed changes from ~8x to 1x.
- One of the comments said just that. "Grounded near disko bay" iirc.
Another comment said that icebergs melt blow water faster than in the air and that flipping is a fairly common thing to do because the center of gravity changes.
- You can see bathtub rings on the underside as it's lifted up. The rings are caused by it's melting faster under the water than in the air, so there's a discontinuity at the waterline.
- 4:40, so this is where people came up with the idea for Godzilla.
- Reminds me of a 'mimoid' from Stanisław Lem's Solaris.
- Gotta say, I haven't seen anything this jawdropping in a long while.
- Honestly, my first thought watching this video is "I want a root beer float." Something in the way the icefalls as the iceberg is flipping over just makes me think of that...
- Structural review clearly got skipped. Somebody is losing their job over this.
- I would have described flipping it over before collapsing. The title seems a clickbait, but is no quite that. Keep in mind that most of the iceberg is off camera, as shown during the first minutes. It lost 80% or 90% of its total mass but most of it isn't seen until the end, when the iceberg goes back to the right.
- now that's epic!
- [flagged]
- Glaciers have been calving huge icebergs into the sea for as long as glaciers have met ocean. Those icebergs eventually melt and collapse just like this.
Rising temps contribute to the rate at which icebergs are produced and the speed at which they melt, but there's nothing in this video in particular that wouldn't have happened 200 years ago aside from the motorboat going by at the beginning.
- [dead]
- Look at the glacial retreat around the mouth of the fjord (which is why tourists go to the town) and yeah, the amount of change is insane.
Any particular iceberg isn't that interesting, but the source! That’s the sad part.
- I was expecting more waves. I am wondering if this video was AI generated. I hate that it is so hard to trust your eyes nowadays…
Edit: Did a quick background check, video seems legit.
- immediate ban
195 points by Bender 7 hours ago | 49 comments