Daring tourists witness incredible moment as iceberg breaks up and flips over nearby

Stunning footage captured the moment a gigantic iceberg collapsed and capsized just feet from daring tourists.

Nestled off the coast of Svalbard, Norway, the massive hunk capsized in an extremely rare event as onlookers looked on in disbelief.

Icebergs are prone to rolling when they break away from their “main glacier,” and their irregular shapes often cause them to wobble a lot.

Scientists say that the mere impact of this can release as much energy as an atomic bomb and can even trigger tsunamis in the most extreme cases.

Rebecca Lucas Gan and Brian Gan from the Philippines filmed the phenomenon while on a voyage with Silversea Cruises.

“I heard a thud and when I looked, I saw that the iceberg started to move and it got bigger and higher as it flipped over,” Ms. Gan said.

“At first, I thought I was hallucinating, as I had never seen anything like this before. Icebergs usually don’t move.

Our guide then explained how lucky we were to witness it because it is extremely rare.

The remarkable event took place at Lilliehookbreen, a 22km-wide glacier complex on the west coast of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago.

It is believed that around 60 percent of Svalbard’s land mass is currently covered by glaciers like this, which is equivalent to 7,000 km³ of ice volume.

While Lilliehookbreen is one of the largest on Svalbard, Austfonna is widely known as the largest ice cap in Europe: it accumulates 1,900 km³ of volume.

For perspective, the Dead Sea, wedged between Palestine, Israel and Jordan, is believed to contain around 114 km³ of water.

The balance between summer temperatures and winter precipitation determines whether these glaciers grow or shrink over time.

Icebergs, like the one seen in Svalbard, usually break up at the “calving stage” of a glacier that occurs as they move forward.

Rebecca Lucas Gan and Brian Gan (pictured) said: “I heard a thud and when I looked over, I saw the iceberg start to move and got bigger/higher as it flipped over.”

Iceberg flipping is a rare phenomenon that occurs when a glacier breaks

While this is a natural process, the Center for Polar Observation and Modeling suggests that the calving and thinning of glaciers has accelerated dramatically since the mid-1990s.

This comes amid global climate change, with Svalbard temperatures rising up to seven times the global average.

Last summer was the hottest on record, with August temperatures in Ny-Aalesund, Spitsbergen, hitting 5.1 degrees Celsius.

Polar bears and reindeer are among the species affected by this, with 200 carcasses found in the summer of 2019 as the animals struggled to find food.

Ashild Onvik Pedersen of the Norwegian Polar Institute previously explained: ‘Climate change is making it rain a lot more.

“The rain falls on top of the snow and forms an ice sheet on the tundra, which makes grazing conditions very bad for the animals.”

READ MORE: The impact of ‘global boiling’: Shocking before-and-after photos reveal how much the Greenland ice sheet melted during ‘hottest month ever recorded on Earth’

Shocking before-and-after photos reveal how much the Greenland ice sheet melted during the “hottest month ever recorded on Earth.”

Taken on June 14, the first image ever taken by a US satellite shows the Greenland ice sheet just before summer temperatures settled.

Meanwhile, the second image from July 24 shows the same region with substantially less snow cover and patches of “dirty” ice where impurities have been exposed.

According to scientists, snow falls on the Greenland ice sheet each winter and acts as a protective shell for the ice from the glacier below during the summer.

But experts say higher summer temperatures are reducing the amount of snow and making ice more prone to melting, contributing to sea level rise.

The Greenland Ice Sheet (pictured) covers about 656,000 square miles, about 80% of Greenland’s area.