Chasing Ice: The Record Ilulissat Glacier Calving Filmed in Greenland

On 28 May 2008, Adam LeWinter and Jeff Orlowski of the Extreme Ice Survey watched a piece of Greenland’s Ilulissat Glacier the size of a city break away and crash into the sea. For about 75 minutes the calving front collapsed, rolled and shattered, and their cameras recorded what Guinness World Records later recognised as the largest and longest glacier calving event ever captured on film by ground-based observers. The footage became the climax of the documentary Chasing Ice.

The Chasing Ice calving footage: 75 minutes at Ilulissat Glacier

The Extreme Ice Survey kept a round-the-clock watch on the glacier that May. LeWinter and Orlowski spent weeks in a small tent on a ridge overlooking the calving front, waiting for something big to happen. When it came, the scale was hard to take in:

• the calving face was about three miles (almost 5 km) wide;
• the front retreated about a mile (1.6 km) during the event;
• the ice reached heights of almost 3,000 feet (about 900 m), with only 300 to 400 feet (90 to 120 m) showing above the water and the rest hidden below;
• about 7.4 cubic kilometres of ice broke away, a volume Exposure Labs compares to roughly 3,000 US Capitol buildings.

Watching the clip, look for the huge slabs that tip over and roll as they fall, and for the waterline, the one steady reference point in a scene with nothing familiar to judge size against.

Chasing Ice and James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey

Chasing Ice follows nature photographer James Balog, who set up the Extreme Ice Survey to document disappearing glaciers. The team installed time-lapse cameras at sites across the Arctic to build a multi-year visual record of glacier retreat. The film was directed by Jeff Orlowski, who also shot much of it.

It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012, where it won the award for Excellence in Cinematography, and opened in US cinemas that November. It later won a 2013 Emmy for Outstanding Nature Programming, and its song “Before My Time”, written by J. Ralph and performed by Scarlett Johansson with violinist Joshua Bell, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Read the wider Chasing Ice story for more.

Jakobshavn Glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq): Greenland’s fastest ice

The glacier in the film is known as Jakobshavn Isbræ, Ilulissat Glacier, or in Greenlandic Sermeq Kujalleq, “the southern glacier”. It drains about 6.5 per cent of the Greenland ice sheet and is one of the fastest glaciers on Earth: in the summer of 2012 its ice moved more than 17 kilometres a year.

Its front retreated about 30 kilometres between 1850 and 1964, then held steady for some 35 years. After 1997 it sped up, thinned and retreated quickly until about 2015, before cooler ocean water helped it re-advance and thicken by 2019. For more glacier change over time, see these glacier comparisons across dated photographs.

Visiting the Ilulissat Icefjord, a UNESCO World Heritage Site

The glacier ends in the Ilulissat Icefjord, which runs 40 kilometres west from the ice sheet to Disko Bay. Around 20 billion tonnes of icebergs calve and drift out of the fjord every year, and UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 2004 for its natural beauty and its value for understanding glaciers and climate.

The town of Ilulissat lies just north of the fjord and is the base for visits. Nearby Sermermiut holds remains of three Inuit cultures, the Saqqaq, Early Dorset and Thule, and people have lived here for almost 4,000 years. Keep your distance from the shore and from icebergs on the water: a big calving can send waves far across the fjord.

Related reading

• Antarctic Icebergs in Motion: Drift, Collapse and Meltwater
• Iain Stewart Explores Ice in Earth: The Power of the Planet
• Silverthorne’s Ice Castle: Tunnels, Arches and Frozen Light
• Eisriesenwelt: The Ice Cavern inside an Austrian Mountain
• Inside Kamchatka’s Mutnovsky Ice Cave
• The Khumbu Icefall through Theodore Fairhurst’s Helmet Camera
• More Greenland stories

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