Eldred Burden looked out stunned from his fishing trawler off the coast of Black Tickle, Labrador.

“I’ve seen icebergs before but this was unreal. It looked like something that shouldn’t be there,” the 52-year-old fisherman told the Star Monday from his home in Port Hope Simpson.

In utter silence, what looked like a floating ice city sat in front of Burden and his sons, a dazzling white ice island five kilometres long and alive with mountains, valleys, brooks, waterfalls, ponds and seals.

The ice island, now drifting down the Labrador coast toward Newfoundland, is a chunk of the Petermann ice mass three times the size of the old city of Toronto that unexpectedly snapped off a Greenland glacier last August.

Even then, scientists worried the ice island could clog shipping lanes or threaten the Hibernia oil exploration.

As they manoeuvred closer to the behemoth, Burden’s sons used their video cameras to capture the breathtaking sight. The eerie and beautiful video has captivated viewers around the world.

Burden poured himself a cup of coffee and just stared.

“I’d never seen anything like this. The boat felt very small.”

A day later, Burden said, the ice island cracked apart “like a block of butter” and the two pieces shot in different directions.

“In no time, they were 20 miles apart. That was really strange to me.”

Canadian Ice Service scientist Trudy Wohlleben discovered the frozen phenomenon, which Canada has been tracking ever since after dropping a beacon onto a fragment.

“It’s so much bigger than any other one,” she said in explaining the fascination with the ice island.

Bigger, in fact, than any ice island lumbering around the North Atlantic in nearly 50 years, with peaks 30 metres high.

Canadian Ice Service has been documenting each time the Petermann Ice Island “calves,” as chunks break off on their southern journey into warmer water, although its beacon stopped working on June 3. Since then, scientists have been monitoring the ice islands via satellite imagery.

Scientists aren’t ready to blame global warming entirely, even if the ice island represented a full one-fifth of the previously stable Greenland glacier it broke from.

“This is a tricky one. There are so many factors at work, it’s hard to make a direct link,” said Wohlleben.

Still, it’s significant. Writing for the American Geophysical Union, a team of geologists including the University of Ottawa’s Luke Copland said it would take two decades for the Greenland glacier to repair itself.

From a fisherman’s point of view, sudden warm weather after a very cold spring and early summer could also have wrenched the floating ice city from its moorings.

Although it’s melting quickly, “it might not melt entirely this year,” said Burden. Even when it reaches the island of Newfoundland “it’s still going to be a big piece of ice.”

Normally, a glacier calving will break into “fragments” the size of normal icebergs, said Wohlleben. If this chunk, or another one 14 kilometres long spotted off northern Labrador, creep near shipping lanes or the Hibernia oil platform, iceberg fighters would try to wrestle with them.

Smaller icebergs get towed out of the way or sprayed with water cannon to render them harmless.

“I don’t think they could do that with an iceberg that large,” said Wohlleben. “They would have to physically move the rig.”

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It’s not clear how fast the ice islands are moving now, but at one point in April one of them was drifting up to 22 nautical miles per day, according to the Environment Canada website.

Burden, whose 50-foot boat is rigged with sophisticated radar that measured the mass, felt no fear gazing at the ice island 110 kilometres off the coast.

“It was awesome to look at the waterfalls on it. I grew up around icebergs. But not like this.”