You tell me...

[LordFerret]

This has been in the news lately - a glacier in Greenland calving off a large chunk. I've been to Alaska, seen over 30 different glaciers (including the Mendenhall, Yale & Harvard), watched a number of them calve (a most awesome sound). Yes, they are big, they are thick, a lot of ice. But, the article posted below, it's claim about ice enough to cover Manhattan Island under 1000 feet of ice?... I find that hard to swallow, a bit of BS. I'm just not buying it. How about you?

The article.

The glacier, near Llulissat Greenland... map scale 1 mile.

The island of Manhattan, NY USA ... map scale 1 mile.

[LN400]

It's not far from the truth if one is to believe the given numbers, 4600 feet high, 5 square miles area, deformed to 1000 feet high with same volume and the new area is pretty close to the land size of Manhattan.

[tater]

The chunk is tiny, but thick. So they are saying that you'd have to slice it into <1000ft thick chunks to tile it over manhattan. Still, the outlined area in their image looks to be substantially smaller than 5 square miles (I measured on Google earth, looks closer to half what they are saying).

[LordFerret]

Yea, that's more what I'm seeing - half of what they're claiming.

[tater]

Maybe the outline is not the actual chunk that came off?

[Kerbart]

According to Wikipedia, Manhattan is about 59.1 km². “Nearly 1,000 feet†translates to about 0.3 km. That gives a volume of 17.3 km³ unless I'm off, and that matches the article.

I assume ESA doesn't make mistakes in measuring the area of the chunk that fell off.

Edited August 25, 2015 by Kerbart
Google gave me a different number first.

[tater]

According to Wikipedia, Manhattan is about 59.1 km². “Nearly 1,000 feet†translates to about 0.3 km. That gives a volume of 17.3 km³ unless I'm off, and that matches the article.

I assume ESA doesn't make mistakes in measuring the area of the chunk that fell off.

I think the issue is likely the image. OP's point is that if you look at the outlined area (not the calculated volume), the area shown in the sat image looks to be substantially smaller than what they calculated.

Here is the actual image, the news article cuts the scale off (stupid reporters):

It looks to be on the rough order of 8km^2 based on the scale, needs to be 12+. Course that's me just eyeballing it.

[LN400]

An extremely rough case of eyeballing here but just looking quickly at the image, I'd say you could shape it into a rectangle about 2-2.5 km x 5-ish km, that would be an area of 10-12.5 km^2 but nobody ever called me Hawkeye.