Adam LeWinter and Jeff Orlowski were part of a team in western Greenland that had cameras set up for glacial viewing as part of the film crew filming Orlowski’s film, Chasing Ice. It was May 2008, and their cameras were capturing footage of the Ilulissat Glacier. They’d been there for days, watching the glacier. This crew managed to be in the right position at the right moment to capture an incredible natural wonder—their cameras captured the greatest glacier calving ever captured on video.

A day that starts sedately for a glacier-watching crew might conclude with something remarkable. When they caught up with other teammates by phone early in the day, there was little to share other than some wind and nothing special or unusual.

But as the day progressed, things became really thrilling. Perched on the edge of a mountain overlooking Greenland’s Ilulissat Glacier, LeWinter and Orlowski observed—and documented—the greatest glacier calving event ever captured on video. As massive pieces of ice break away from a glacier’s edge during calving, new icebergs arise.

According to Guiness World Records, the Ilulissat Glacier calved pieces of ice that decreased the glacier’s extent by three miles wide and one mile broad in just 75 minutes. As if that weren’t enough, the glacier and its icebergs reach a height of almost 3,000 feet, the majority of which is submerged.

An onlooker watching the glacier calving would see the snow-covered ice splitting and moving, creating an avalanche effect. The sounds of roaring and cracking are complemented by images of sweeping seas that seem to be attempting to engulf the freshly created icebergs. The immense size of the icebergs has been compared to the rising and falling of Manhattan skyscrapers.

Massive icebergs bounced thousands of feet into the air before crashing back down, generating huge waves in the freezing ocean. It’s difficult to comprehend the massive size of the icebergs that seem to glide smoothly. However, the glacier is already 200 to 300 feet above the ocean, and some of the sliding icebergs soared to 600 feet before dropping back.

Even after all of these years, this video evidence shot from a peak overlooking western Greenland remains amazing to anybody who views it. The film of this incident was classified in the 2016 Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest glacier calving ever captured on camera, according to the Earth Vision Institute. The video was later used in the documentary film Chasing Ice.

Although most people acknowledge nature’s incredible power, few have seen with their own eyes the type of wonder that LeWinter and Orlowski saw and captured that day in 2008. They recount the amazing, scary, stunning, and mind-boggling experience that stunned the globe in their video footage and the subsequent film.

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