This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Summer is prime iceberg season in Greenland's glacier-fed fjords, and 2026 was no exception. Especially notable was the berg that broke from Petermann Glacier along Greenland's northwest coast in August.
Virgin Islands, it was the largest calving event by any Arctic glacier since 2020. Iceberg calving is a routine part of an outlet glacier's life cycle. Scientists watch the process closely, however, along with numerous other observations of the ice and its environment, for longer-term signs of instability.
Petermann is one of Greenland's largest marine-terminating glaciers and acts as a gatekeeper for ice flowing from the ice sheet into the ocean. Its future stability has implications for sea level rise. The calving event of summer 2026 was spotted Aug. 4 by Adam Garbo, a doctoral student in glaciology at the University of Ottawa, in imagery from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 mission.
Garbo and an international team of colleagues have been using remote sensing to study and track the glacier's ice tongue. The team reported that the large tabular iceberg, or "ice island," measured just over 76 square kilometers (29 square miles) at the time it calved—the largest to break from the glacier since the ice island of 2012 (130 square kilometers, 50 square miles). The 2012 calving followed earlier major events in 2008 (31 square kilometers, 12 square miles) and 2010 (just over 250 square kilometers, 97 square miles).
The August 2026 event could have been even bigger. Garbo and colleagues had been expecting a major calving once one of the large rifts they were monitoring finally cut all the way across Petermann's ice tongue. "What surprised us was that the calving instead followed a different fracture, producing a smaller ice island than we had originally anticipated," Garbo said.
As of late August, two large rifts remained and were expected to eventually produce new ice islands of roughly 94 square kilometers (36 square miles) and 84 square kilometers (32 square miles), though the timing remained uncertain. Glaciologist Mauri Pelto of Nichols College has also been tracking the iceberg, using images from NASA–USGS Landsat satellites, as it drifted down Petermann Fjord toward Nares Strait. In the week after it calved, the berg drifted an average of 3 kilometers per day (1.9 miles per day).
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