A century of tracking icebergs
April 16, 2012 12:47 PM Subscribe
Three thousand years ago, snow fell on Greenland, creating what would become an iceberg in this century. Centuries pass and snow piles up, until it is
60 to 70 meters thick and forms glacial ice. As glaciers slowly flow into the ocean,
the end of the glaciers calve, or break off. In Greenland, some 40,000
medium to large sized icebergs calve each year, making their way south.
Of the 10,000 to 15,000 icebergs annually calved from glaciers in the Arctic, on the average only 375 pass Newfoundland into the North Atlantic Ocean.
On April 14, 1912, an iceberg was some 5,000 miles south of the Arctic Circle when a boat ran into it,
leaving a smear of red paint along the base of the berg.
The lifespan of an iceberg is relatively short, an average of two to three years from calving to melting into the ocean. The iceberg that sank the Titanic is long gone, but
iceberg alley was still an area of concern for safety in
the ship lanes of the North Atlantic. The sinking of the Titanic lead to
a number of changes in safety practices, including the formation of the
International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (
SOLAS). Ahead of the international convention, the
U.S. Navy assigned the cruisers USS Chester and USS Birmingham to patrol the
Grand Banks for the remainder of 1912. This was the North Atlantic Ice Patrol, which became the
International Ice Patrol in 1913, who have been active since then,
tracking icebergs in the North Atlantic.
Iceberg Finder tracks bergs along the Newfoundland and Labrador coast, more for tourism than shipping, and
Ice Data keeps track of
ship collisions with icebergs (
old version with chronological listing).
The ocean off of Newfoundland was empty in July 2010, but
the huge ice island that broke free from the Petermann glacier in 2010 lead to
iceberg alley once again living up to its namesake in 2011.
posted by filthy light thief (34 comments total)
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posted by troika at 12:50 PM on April 16, 2012 [2 favorites]