A 300-foot high iceberg is approaching Greenland, and this photo is the latest sign that Mother Nature has had it

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A 300-foot high iceberg is approaching Greenland, and this photo is the latest sign that Mother Nature has had it

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greenland iceberg

Ritzau Scanpix / Karl Petersen / via REUTERS

The giant iceberg, seen perched behind an Innaarsuit settlement in Greenland on July 12, 2018.

  • This massive glacier is hovering over the tiny village of Innaarsuit in northwest Greenland.
  • Residents have been evacuated from the danger zone.
  • If it calves, the glacier could prompt a massive tsunami, swamping the town.

They're used to seeing icebergs floating around in Greenland, but nothing quite this big.

A massive iceberg came just shy of one football field's distance (100 meters) away from the shore there on Thursday, and some residents had to be evacuated to hillier spots.

Keld Quistgaard from the Danish Meteorological Institute told the Danish Broadcasting Corporation that the 'berg weighs anywhere between eight and 10 million tons, and rises nearly 300 feet in the air above the water.

"We are used to big icebergs, but we haven't seen such a big one before," Susanna Eliassen, a member of the village council in Innaarsuit, told the Greenlandic Broadcasting Corporation (KNR).

Just 169 people live in Innaarsuit, according to The New York Times. At least 33 people have been evacuated so far, KNR reported.

On Saturday, the giant ice flow had moved out from the shore, and was sitting about 0.3 miles (500 meters) away from the village, but KNR was still calling it a "special situation," and images showed the town is not out of the danger zone yet.

It's part of a troubling trend in the Arctic, where global warming is happening twice as fast as it is elsewhere on the planet.

"The Arctic shows no sign of returning to the reliably frozen region it was decades ago,"the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said when it released its 2017 Arctic Report Card.

Last year, at least four people were killed in Greenland when a huge wave washed ashore in June. F our houses were also flushed out to sea after a tsunami was prompted by a landslide.

Watch what happens as just a sliver breaks off from the giant iceberg hovering over the town, causing a giant wave to head towards the shore, and gently rocking the entire mass of ice:

Of course, Greenland isn't the only place feeling the heat recently.

This summer, temperatures have sweltered across the US, with cities suffering through stifling heat waves from New York to LA. The Times reports that our steamy nights are warming nearly twice as fast as days, and it's becoming a deadly problem across North America.

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