Sustainable Travel · Newfoundland

Cliff Diver Molly Carlson Dives From an Iceberg off Twillingate, Newfoundland

The Canadian Red Bull athlete climbed a free-floating berg with ice climber Will Gadd and dropped backwards about 15 metres into the Atlantic. The iceberg specialists who kept her safe would like visitors to draw a different lesson from it.

By SEVENSEAS Media | Ocean Conservation

On 11 June 2026, off the coast of Twillingate on Newfoundland’s north coast, the cliff diver Molly Carlson stood on a small platform near the top of an iceberg with her back to the sea, and pushed off. She fell roughly 15 metres into water that Red Bull describes as close to freezing. Red Bull, which ran the project and released the footage in October, says she is the first woman to dive from a free-standing iceberg. Carlson, 28, finished second in the 2026 Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series, where the platforms are 21 metres high and do not move.

The wording of that claim is careful for a reason. Men have jumped from icebergs before. In 2018 Orlando Duque, who won the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series in 2009, dived from an iceberg in Antarctica after a 31-day journey to reach it.

Where Twillingate’s icebergs come from

Twillingate sits on Iceberg Alley, the stretch of water along Newfoundland and Labrador’s east coast where bergs drift south each spring. Most of them break off Greenland’s glaciers and are carried south by the Labrador Current, a route described by the Associated Press in a profile of the patrol that tracks them. A University of Manitoba oceanographer told National Geographic that a single berg can hold ice tens of thousands of years old, laid down across several different eras.

How many arrive in a given year is close to unpredictable. The International Ice Patrol, set up after the Titanic sank in 1912 and run by the US Coast Guard, counts the icebergs that drift south of the 48th parallel, a line crossing Newfoundland between Bonavista and St. John’s. National Geographic, citing the patrol, reported more than 1,500 in 2019, then 169 in 2020, one in 2021 and 58 in 2022. A Fisheries and Oceans Canada scientist quoted in the same piece said researchers do not yet fully understand why some years bring many bergs and others almost none, and the magazine reported that scientists are unsure what a warming climate will mean for future seasons. The patrol’s annual season summaries are archived at the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Learning to climb before learning to fall

Carlson had to get up the iceberg before she could come off it, and she had not climbed ice before. She trained with Will Gadd, 59, a Canadian ice climber with more than 30 years in the sport, starting on a 10-metre training wall in Canmore, Alberta, moving on to harder ice in the Ghost River Wilderness Area and finishing on a 20-metre pitch, about the height she expected to face on the berg. In Montréal, her home base, she tested the wetsuit she would wear and worked up from low indoor jumps to 15 metres. Cliff divers do not usually compete in wetsuits, and Red Bull’s account of the project points out a less obvious problem: falling through a scene that is almost entirely white leaves very little to judge distance by.

Gadd has been here before. He said in Red Bull’s release that he first climbed an iceberg 25 years ago, and that he would not have taken on the project if it were only about the climbing.

Choosing a berg

Marine support came from Ocean Quest Adventures, led by Rick Stanley, and Crosby Marine Film Services, led by Jason Crosby. Red Bull says the Canadian Coast Guard helped with safety planning and communications. The team scouted dozens of icebergs around Twillingate and rejected most of them. Carlson’s list of requirements was short and strict: boat access, a sheer edge to dive from, a clear landing zone, and a climb she could manage without putting Gadd at risk. They settled on a free-floating berg they called No Name.

Gadd climbed first and installed a temporary line and a small platform. Carlson followed in crampons, took them off at the top along with her outer layers, stepped onto the platform facing the ice and leaned back. Red Bull describes it as her highest backwards dive to date.

Her first thought on surfacing, she told Red Bull, was to swim, and to get away from the ice as fast as she could. That instinct was the right one. “The biggest hazard is that icebergs can roll over,” Gadd said in the same account. “When they roll over, it’s super violent.”

What the boat crews tell everyone else

For more than 30 years I have worked around icebergs, and the only thing you can count on is their unpredictability.

Rick Stanley, co-owner and president, Ocean Quest Adventures

Stanley’s statement in the release goes further than the usual safety line. He said his company would never encourage ordinary visitors touring the coast to break the safe distance, because bergs can roll, calve or move at any moment, and that the dive went ahead only because of the athletes’ skill and the size of the team around them. Jason Crosby described several people monitoring swell and berg movement throughout.

Twillingate has seen the other version of this story. CBC reported on a man filmed stripping to his shorts, swimming out to an iceberg near the town and climbing on top of it. A Red Cross instructor told the broadcaster that it could easily have ended in tragedy. Red Bull’s dive had a coast guard plan, two marine specialist firms and an ice climber with three decades of experience rigging the route. A kayaker or a small charter boat edging in for a closer photograph has none of that, and the ice behaves the same way for both.

Carlson presents the dive as part of her work on fear and anxiety through BraveGang, a community Red Bull says has more than four million members. She compared the iceberg to the way people carry fear, with a small part visible and most of it hidden underneath. Red Bull’s documentary, Red Bull Iceberg Dive, follows her from the training wall in Canmore to the water off Twillingate.

This article draws on Red Bull’s press materials, its published feature on the dive and the Red Bull Content Pool story. SEVENSEAS did not attend the dive. Red Bull’s feature captions date the dive to October 2026; the press release and the photographs’ own captions give 11 June 2026, which is the date used here.

SEVENSEAS Media · Conservation Journalism for the Ocean