Giant icebergs may have kept tourists operators busy off the Dunedin coast over the past few weeks, but they are not the only ones with iceberg fever.
The Tasman glacier in the Mount Cook National Park is having a bumper calving (breaking up into smaller ice masses) season, producing the most, and the biggest icebergs seen in the glacial lake in years.
"Some of them are the size of a six-story hotel...They're pretty massive," says local ski-plane pilot Gary Rowe.
As the size of the icebergs grow, so too does the lake.
"It's sort of a double-sided effect. As the lake gets bigger it melts the glacier faster, and then the bigger the lake gets, the more the glacier it's actually touching, so the more ice it's actually affecting," says Glacier Explorers spokesperson Brent Shears.
It is a sight that has made drought weary Australian tourists look on in envy.
"We're trying to work out a way at the moment to be able to pack
them up [and] take them on the plane home," says one tourist.
And asides from keeping tourists in awe, the ice melt is adding to
rising hydro storage levels which have been recently topped up by
two weeks of heavy rain.
Meridian says Lake Pukaki is now 69% full and Lake Tekapo 82%,
well above average for this time of year.
