An impressive new video shows the giant layer of ice that shaped the Scottish landscape during the last ice age and looks like it has come out Game of Thrones.
The film recreates how the 1-kilometer-thick (1-kilometer) glacier would have been at the top of the modern city of Dundee. The glacier rises above the city like the Game of Thrones The immense ice tower of the series over the Castle Black fortress.
Kieran Duncan, a professor of communication design at the University of Dundee in Scotland, created the video with Max Van Wyk of Vries, a glaciologist at the University of Minnesota.
They include the 171-meter-high (174-meter) Dundee Law Hill, a local Dundee landmark about as high as the Washington Monument (169m high), to illustrate the size of the glacier.
“Part of the film shows what a 1 km layer of ice would have looked like on top of the [Dundee] Law, and I remember my mind blowing when Max first told me about it, ”Duncan said in a statement.
“You feel numbers like that, but only when you see what that would have been like in relation to something like the Law, which rises above the city, do you begin to conceive of the massif that this glacier had.”
Related: In photos: The disappearing glaciers of the European Alps
Glaciers covered Dundee and most of the British Isles 20,000 years ago, towards the end of the last ice age (about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). When the Earth warmed again about 15,000 years ago, glaciers retreated and sculpted elements of the landscape, such as the Dundee Act, according to the statement.
Van Wyk de Vries decided to find out more about Scotland’s past when he visited his girlfriend in Dundee last March and was unable to return home to the United States due to a COVID-19 closure. The couple began exploring Dundee and the surrounding area to exercise.
(Kieran J. Duncan)
At the top: an excerpt from the video comparing the height of the glacier with the current Dundee.
“It made me think about these beautiful landscapes and how they were formed by the flowing ice,” Van Wyk of Vries said.
To find details about the glacier, he scanned scientific articles, local data and ice models. He also looked at satellite images of current glaciers in Greenland.
Van Wyk de Vries received public engagement funding from the British Society for Geomorphology and partnered with Duncan to visualize his work.
The 3-minute film uses animated visualization techniques, filmed footage, and time-lapse video to bring the ancient glacier over Dundee to life.
It was posted to YouTube on September 6 and is part of the “Time and Tide” exhibition at The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery and Museum until October 3.
Related content: