A tsunami stemming from a landslide in a Greenland fjord, caused by melting ice, was behind a surprising seismic event last year that shook the earth for nine days, a researcher told AFP on Friday.

According to a report recently published in the scientific journal Science, tremors that were registered in September 2023 originated from the massive wave rocking back and forth in the Dickson fjord in Greenland’s remote east.

“The completely unique thing about this event is how long the seismic signal lasted and how constant the frequency was,” one of the authors of the report, Kristian Svennevig, from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, told AFP.

“Other landslides and tsunamis have produced seismic signals but only for a couple of hours and very locally. This one was observed globally all the way to the Antarctic,” he said.

The phenomenon initially surprised the scientific community, which began by defining it as an “unidentified seismic object” before determining that the source was the landslide.

In September 2023, 882 million cubic feet of rock and ice — a volume equivalent to 25 Empire State Buildings — fell into the fjord in the remote and uninhabited area, about 124 miles from the ocean.

The landslide triggered a 650-foot-high mega-tsunami at its epicenter.

Over 40 miles away, tsunami waves over a dozen feet high damaged a research base on the island of Ella.

“When colleagues first spotted this signal last year, it looked nothing like an earthquake,” Stephen Hicks, a scientist who has a doctorate in earth sciences and was involved in the report, told BBC News. “It kept appearing — every 90 seconds for nine days.”

A group of scientists started to discuss the strange signal on an online chat platform, according to BBC News.

The team created a model that showed how the wave sloshed back and forth for nine days.

“We’ve never seen such a large scale movement of water over such a long period,” Hicks told BBC News.

The collapse was caused by the thinning of the glacier at the base of the mountain, a process accelerated by climate change, according to the report.

“With the Arctic continuing to warm we may expect the frequency and magnitude of such events to increase in the future,” Svennevig said.

“We have no experience with dealing with an Arctic as warm as we observe now,” he added.

He stressed the need for early warning systems to be put in place, but noted that it was a challenge in such extreme environments.

United Airlines will soon provide free Wi-Fi to passengers on flights after inking a deal with Starlink, the satellite constellation internet provider from Elon Musk-owned SpaceX. 

The offering will set a new standard for in-flight Wi-Fi, which can often be costly and unreliable for passengers, the airline said in a statement Friday.

Starlink services will be available on United Airlines’ fleet of 1,000 aircraft, enabling customers to stream movies and television without buffering or requiring them to download content in advance. It will also let them browse the internet, upload and download files at fast speeds, and play online games. 

United passengers will also be able to connect multiple mobile devices to the internet once, the companies said Friday. In the era of remote work, the service will allow United passengers to work from locations that wouldn’t typically offer connectivity.

The same technology is currently available to Hawaiian Airlines passengers on select flights. Currently, United provides paid Wi-Fi options to customers through four different providers. The service costs MileagePlus members $8, and nonmembers $10 to log on. 

United will start testing the use of Starlink internet services in 2025. It’s expected to be deployed on passenger flights later that year. 

“Everything you can do on the ground, you’ll soon be able to do onboard a United plane at 35,000 feet, just about anywhere in the world,” United CEO Scott Kirby said in a statement Friday. “This connectivity opens the door for an even better in-flight entertainment experience, in every seatback — more content, that’s more personalized. United’s culture of innovation is, once again, delivering big for our customers.”

Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer at SpaceX, said the partnership will “transform” flying.

“With Starlink onboard your United flight, you’ll have access to the world’s most advanced high-speed internet from gate to gate, and all the miles in between,” she said.

Starlink is enabled by low Earth orbit satellites that let it deliver low-latency internet in remote areas where cell or Wi-Fi signals aren’t typically available, like over oceans, according to the announcement.

Passengers have increasingly come to expect to be able to access the internet during flights. Nearly 80% of flight passengers connect to Wi-Fi when it’s made available to them, according to mobile satellite services provider Inmarsat.

The new deal could even let passengers take Zoom calls from the skies, once again redefining what remote work looks like.