Ilulissat Glacier, Greenland - Adam LeWinter
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May 2008
Adam LeWinter
Adam is Extreme Ice Survey field operations manager. While camped at Greenland’s Ilulissat Glacier in May 2008, Adam, along with EIS team member Jeff Orlowski, witnessed the largest calving event ever captured on film. Adam’s degree in engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder was put to good use during the design of the first EIS time-lapse camera systems.
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| For a month in 2008, Jeff Orlowski and I kept a 24-hour watch on two glaciers in Greenland: Ilulissat and Store. We were waiting for the massive calving events that occur at the beginning of the melt season, the equivalent of glaciers shedding their winter coats. Using HD video cameras and time-lapse still photography, we worked in shifts to keep batteries charged and memory cards clear, and at times struggled to keep our tents from blowing away.
We were six days into our watch at Ilulissat and the only thing to happen worth mentioning was that two of our tents were destroyed in 70+ mph winds, leaving us cramped for space and fearful that our remaining two were not long for this world. During a scheduled satellite phone call with James Balog back in Boulder, Jeff heard, and saw, the first piece of collapsing ice that indicated some kind of event. Immediately I told James I’d have to call him back.
A 75-minute explosion ensued. Spires of ice 3,000 feet tall shot up out of the fjord and tumbled into a maelstrom of churning, newly freed icebergs. At one point, the whole south section of the glacier, more than three miles wide, broke off nearly 1,000 feet upstream and rolled into the ocean. We had four HD video cameras running, five time-lapse cameras shooting, and four eyes witnessing a phenomenon in complete awe and disbelief.
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