Viral Clip Shows Moment Iceberg Flips Over in Rare Phenomenon

A video of an iceberg flipping over in a glacier lagoon has captivated millions on TikTok.

On December 1, user @giannaprim posted the clip, which has since received more than 16.4 million views, showing the icy mass in Iceland rotating in the water. In the video’s caption, the user wrote, “Iceberg flipping over in Fjallsárlón glacier lagoon.”

In the background, a voice can be heard saying, “Oh my God,” as the iceberg begins to tip over.

The video captures a phenomenon that may become increasingly common because of climate change, said Max Dugan-Knight, a climate data scientist at Deep Sky, a carbon removal project developer. Dugan-Knight and his team sit on billions of climate data points and constantly monitor climate change.

Newsweek has contacted @giannaprim for comment via TikTok. This video has not been independently verified.

Flips can occur for two main reasons, with one being that the iceberg has “recently broken off from a glacier and [has] not stabilized in the water yet,” Dugan-Knight told Newsweek, describing this as calving, the natural process by which icebergs are formed.

However, he suggested that the more likely explanation for the moment captured in the TikTok video is rapid melting, the second reason for iceberg flips. The icebergs are “melting quickly, which is changing their weight distribution, causing them to flip,” Dugan-Knight said.

A NASA-funded study published in Science in January 2023 estimated that global glaciers could lose up to 40 percent of their mass by 2100 under temperature increases ranging from 1.5 to 4 degrees Celsius.

In Iceland, glaciers cover about 10 percent of the country’s area but are rapidly retreating. A November 2020 study in Frontiers in Earth Science found that some Icelandic glaciers had disappeared entirely or had been classified as “dead ice,” no longer contributing to glacier dynamics.

The retreat is evident in data such as that collected by Kieran Baxter, a lecturer at the University of Dundee in Scotland. His time-lapse footage from Iceland’s Breiðamerkurjökull glacier in Vatnajökull National Park showed significant ice loss over six weeks, underscoring the urgent threat of climate change.

Dugan-Knight explained that the dark blue streaks visible on the iceberg in the viral TikTok video were composed of highly compressed, ancient ice. This type of ice has formed under immense pressure over the years, contributing to the iceberg’s striking appearance.

While the sight of an iceberg flipping is dramatic and rare, it is not unexpected given the warming trends in the northeast Atlantic Ocean around Iceland, the climate data scientist said.

“As sea surface temperatures increase due to climate change, we will see more and more icebergs flip like this,” Dugan-Knight said. “For the past two years, temperatures have been far above normal and show no sign of dropping back to less anomalous levels.”

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