Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Iceberg’s down, surf’s up

It was an article by Maurice Chittenden in The Sunday Times that started the excitement. The article appropriately completes with the following picture and a descriptive long title: "Iceberg's down, surf's up -- riding a glacial tsunami is the coolest extreme sport." Since then the story has been picked up around the world in an ever growing numbers of new articles reporting this feat.
As Chittenden described that:
It is not the easiest of pastimes to enjoy. First you have to find a glacier about to “calve”, then wait for up to a fortnight for a house-sized iceberg to break off before catching the monstrous wake after it hits the water from 500ft high. The reward: 60 seconds of sheer exhilaration as you ride a 25ft wall of ice-cold water filled with millions of shards of razor sharp ice, mud, boulders and debris.
Take a look at the rewarding video here among many other places. Watching the incipience and fall of glaciers that generated huge tsunami kind of muddy waves advance across the ocean at the bottom of the glacier is truly unique. Again it's not freaque wave, but it something that every ocean wave aficionados would certainly appreciate to see it again and again. Science can probably estimate the size of wave if the size of glacier is known. But how how can anyone be certain which one and what's the size of the glacier that's going to fall? Nature is in control here, no one else can -- no matter what the size of your carbon footprint might be!

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