A Greenland Iceberg Rolls Over, on Camera

Off Ilulissat in western Greenland, a camera caught an enormous iceberg turning over. As the submerged portion melts, the mass shifts its centre of gravity until it topples, raising into daylight a face that spent years underwater. The area sits at the mouth of one of the fastest-moving glacier fronts on the planet, where such events are regularly observed.

Scale is what makes the footage striking and also what the footage struggles to convey. Without a boat or a shoreline in frame, an iceberg gives away nothing about its size, and its apparent slowness hides how much mass is moving. A single flip is not evidence of collapse — icebergs roll as they melt — and treating one dramatic event as proof tends to backfire once the same image repeats. Video solves the problem of speed. Showing slow, continuous loss remains the work of photography and archives.