July 15, 2012 Tsunami: Ilulissat Icefjord, Greenland
A tsunami caused by a landslide began at Ilulissat Icefjord, Greenland on July 15, 2012.
Where the waves reached
The source of the tsunami. No runup with a place is recorded for it.
- Under 1 m
- 1 to 3 m
- 3 to 10 m
- 10 to 30 m
- 30 m and more
- Height not recorded
Travel times
How long the first wave took to reach each part of the ocean, one line for each hour up to 24, estimated from the source and the depth of the sea.
The travel times are computed in your browser, which needs JavaScript.
- 1 to 4 hours
- 5 to 6 hours
- 7 to 14 hours
- 15 hours and more
Computed in your browser the way NOAA’s own travel time maps are: the wave travels at the square root of gravity times the depth, over NOAA’s ETOPO1 depths averaged to a 10 arc-minute grid. Checked against NOAA NCEI’s maps for 21 tsunamis over the first 24 hours, these lines fall within 10 minutes of NCEI’s at half the points compared and within 52 minutes at 9 in 10. They give when the first wave could arrive, not how high it is; bays, harbors and island chains finer than the grid can see it later. Not for use in a warning: see tsunami.gov.
The tsunami
- Date
- July 15, 2012
- Source
- Ilulissat Icefjord, Greenland
- Cause
- Landslide
- Runups recorded
- 0
- Waters
- Ocean
- How certain
- Definite tsunami
- Source location
- 69.200° N, 51.300° W
The toll
The record gives no deaths, injuries or damage for this tsunami.
What the record says
NCEI’s account, from the sources it cites.
Ilulissat, the third largest settlement in Greenland, is also historic. It has been there since 1740 and now is Greenland's most popular tourist destination thanks to the gorgeous Ilulissat Icefjord (tourism is the town's principal industry). All of which brings us to Jens Muller who is a Greenland native but from another community.
He recently posted a most interesting video of an event that happened on a beautiful, sunny day in Greenland; an event that easily could have cost him and two others their lives. Jens picks it up from there. "A tourist from Australia came to my uncle and asked if she could get a ride to the glacier just north of Ilulissat, Greenland, so he asked me if I wanted to be his translator. I am from another town where glaciers are fairy tales, I was as much of a tourist as the Australian tourist, so I decided to join the crew. The beautiful scenery was amazing, but the nature doesn't care about anyone. That day almost became our last day." So it was Jens, his uncle and the Australian tourist in the small boat that drove out to the big glacier that everyone wants to see. The glacier flows at a rate of 65 to 115 feet per day, resulting in around 20 billion tons of icebergs calving off and passing out of the fjord every year. Icebergs breaking from the glacier are often so large (up to 3,300 feet in height) that they are too tall to float down the fjord and instead lay stuck on the bottom of its shallower areas, sometimes for years, until they are broken up by the force of the glacier and icebergs further up the fjord. As Jens was filming the glacier and the beauty of the surroundings, that is when it happened. A massive portion of the glacier calved off and dropped into the sea; a big enough piece that it generated a huge wave.
(reference #9925)
It's unclear when the footage was shot but it was uploaded yesterday [July 19, 2012] by a man from Greenland who goes by the username Barbecueengineer. (reference #9926)
"For several days this month, Greenland's surface ice cover melted over a larger area than at any time in more than 30 years of satellite observations," NASA said in a new report that details how "97 percent of the ice sheet surface thawed at some point in mid-July." (reference #9927)
More
Every tsunami in 2012The 2000sTsunamis of GreenlandThis day in weather historyAlerts in force
Sources
Tsunami events and runups from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, Global Historical Hazard Database, cited as NCEI/WDS, doi:10.7289/V5PN93H7. Public domain. Read 2026-09-24. NCEI tsunami event 5460.