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The sound of the Iceberg

Overall rating (37 ratings)
S
stormpetrel

January 4th, 2013

Follow
Sound effects > Objects / House appliances
-66.64, 139.990
Southern oceans soundscape

This is the sound of an iceberg I have recorded in Antarctica in 2009. The iceberg was a big one, more than 40m high! Despite the icebergs are trapped in the ice shelf, they move due to the tide and the low frequency waves coming from the open sea which propagate under the ice shelf. Those movements produce very powerful and impressive grinding noise!
The iceberg was 8km away from the scientific base of Dumont D'Urville in Terre Adélie and far away from the open sea (at least 100km).

It was a bit challenging to do such record. It was cold (not a surprise) and very windy most of the time! This was also a place you don't want to stay too long as pieces of ice fell around.

Microphone: Rode NT4, homemade preamp, M-Audio microtrack II.

A picture of the iceberg is visible on my flickr page here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dominique_filippi/4356182500/in/set-72157623332887396

Let me know what this sound does on you!

Sound illegal or offensive? Flag it!
air
Antarctica
atmosphere
cold
field-recording
friction
frozen
grinding
ice
iceberg
incredible
nature
NT4
ocean
rasping
rode
sea
shelf
soundscade

Type

Flac (.flac)

Duration

3:15.733

File size

17.4 MB

Sample rate

48000.0 Hz

Bit depth

16 bit

Channels

Stereo

Comments
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jb_stems

7 years, 1 month ago

Impressive!!! <3

malupeeters

7 years, 9 months ago

wow! I never heard this sound before! Thanks! I was in Greenland this summer, on the big ice sheet, and our guide was telling us about the continuous - and dangerous - movements of the big ice, and of the sounds it produces that he heard on hydrophonic recordings, but I did not bring a hydrophone unfortunately, so I could not capture it! As it seems and as you have proven here, the movements are very audible in air too, depending on where you are near the ice I guess. Very powerful.

S
samantaray

7 years, 11 months ago

What a fantastic recording, and such a humbling sound, the slow incessant strength of that big lump of ice. Many thanks for going to the effort to record this experience and for describing it so well too.

S
stormpetrel

9 years, 11 months ago

Hi Fififugas

No time stretching, this the real stuff!

F
fififugas

9 years, 11 months ago

but this was recorded during a long period of time right? i would never guessed it, were you scratching it or was a motor doing it? amazing

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  1. 1.2K downloads
  2. 28 comments
Attribution NonCommercial 4.0
You are free to share (to copy, distribute and transmit) and to remix (to adapt and modify) as long as you credit the author of the sound and do not use the sound for commercial purposes. Get attribution text...
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