Dispatches from the End of Ice

by Beth Peterson

  It wasn’t until fairly recently that ships—and the companies that employ them—began thinking of traveling to icebergs. For most of shipping history, avoiding icebergs—not trying to hunt them down—has been the goal.

  Before 1912, the year the Titanic sank after colliding with an iceberg near the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, ships mostly relied on other ships’ radio calls and on their own lookouts, usually supplied with binoculars, who took shifts in the crows’ nests to watch for other ships, icebergs, or land. After the Titanic, some big changes took place in the realm of shipping. Only one year later, the first “Safety of Life at Seas” conference was called between world shipping powers. I see the original minutes for one part of this conference. The committee recording of the minutes is originally typed out, in all caps, “COMMITTEE ON SAFETY OF NAVIGATION.” In pencil, though, “ON SAFETY OF NAVIGATION” is crossed out and “ON LIFE SAVING APPLIANCES” is added just below the original title, also in block letters.

  The conference did call for, among other things, lifesaving appliances like the standardization of lifeboats on ships and also increasing regulations that all ships’ watches must be twenty-four hours. At the first conference there were also appeals for regular and regulated ice patrols. Soon the International Ice Patrol was founded with the goal of monitoring icebergs in the North Atlantic during the high shipping season of March to August, sending out twice-daily radio calls about these icebergs to ships.

  Gradually, technology improved and there were more ways to monitor icebergs. Both radar (electromagnetic sensors) and sonar (equipment that can hear sound waves reflected from objects) began to be used more widely in the early 1900s, allowing ships to detect icebergs even a few kilometers away. More recently, the International Ice Patrol and others have turned to computer plots, satellite imagery, and real-time maps to notify ships of the whereabouts of icebergs.

  The system is much improved, but it isn’t perfect. According to the Institute of Ocean Technology, between 1980 and 2005 there were 2.3 iceberg crashes a year. Even with all the modern technology, there’s still a sense, it seems, that we need to be vigilant to track things above and things below.

  I learned the same basic idea of paying attention to both what’s above and what’s below when my brother taught me to sail, although it wasn’t icebergs then, just underbrush at the bottom of the lake. I was ten or twelve at the time, and my brother two years older; we were on a two-person sailboat, coasting across a small lake in northern Wisconsin, a place we came to every summer. He’d taught me the fundamentals of sailing the year before: where to sit, how to raise the white fabric sail, how to harness the wind, and how to shift the rudder in order to tack, moving our narrow boat from one part of the lake to another. It was perhaps in our genes; when my father was about our age, he and his friends used to sail in the early mornings on another Wisconsin lake. One of his brothers even built his own boat, a small pram that they’d take out in the harbor.

  This particular summer afternoon, as we were coasting toward shore, the sail curved, the rope flapping against the mast. We’d made it almost all the way across the lake, straight to the densely wooded shore, when suddenly my brother turned the boat fast, too fast, and we were tossed out as the mast tipped down and the boat lurched over, rolling into the water.

  I’d learned—again from my brother—how to right a boat when it tipped. For several minutes, treading water beside the upside-down boat, we tried, moving onto the centerboard and leaning back, tugging at the boat’s sides. But this day, we couldn’t upright the boat. As hard as we pulled, it wouldn’t move. Finally, I loosened the straps of my life jacket and ducked my head underwater to see what I could see. It was dim and cloudy, but I could see the mast facing straight down, a foot or more of its tip stuck in the shallower-than-we’d-imagined lake-bottom muck and weeds.

  When I ask my brother about this story some years later, when we’re in our twenties, he remembers the story differently, with my action making the sailboat tip, not his, my inexperience, or perhaps my shifting weight throwing us off-kilter and the boat into the weeds. I will wonder for some time after if it mattered whose fault it really was, or if perhaps the crash was inevitable, two young kids only skimming across the surface.

  According to the Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, the first recorded use of the phrase “tip of the iceberg” was in the 1950s. The Online Etymology Dictionary puts the date a bit later and more exactly, at 1962, although neither source adds any details about who first mentioned the phrase or where.

  The idea of using an iceberg to talk about literature is much more traceable. In the 1920s Ernest Hemingway began to talk about “iceberg theory” or the idea that an omission can strengthen a story, leaving what was unsaid up to the reader to understand, through images or subtle phrasings that suggest something important is happening just below the surface. It was an idea that Hemingway had taken from his time working as a journalist, when he only had space on the page for the immediate and was unable to include even relevant, seemingly helpful background. When he began writing fiction, he tried the same approach.

  In Death in the Afternoon (1932), he wrote: “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

  The first time I hear of Hemingway’s iceberg theory, it’s in the context of subtextual dialogue, of saying more than what you are saying. My friend and I who are talking about the idea speak for a while about the risks: being opaque, elusive, confusing. What we don’t talk about, though, is the equal possibility of discovery, of finding that the thing just below surface is more wonderful or more terrifying than we ever imagined.

  In actuality, the tip of an iceberg can vary widely. Tabular icebergs, the kind featured in the Emirates Iceberg Project’s video, are generally flat on the top, with nearly vertical sides above the water. Nontabular icebergs—a catchall designation for every other type of iceberg—come in a variety of shapes, from rounded domes to ice wedges to the mountainlike pinnacles that are commonly shown in photographs and illustrations. The tallest icebergs have been nearly 500 feet high, but icebergs can be much smaller too, technically starting—according to the National Ocean Service—at dimensions of 16 feet high and 98 to 164 feet thick and covering at least 5,382 square feet. In any case, icebergs all begin by breaking off of larger pieces of ice, whether glaciers or ice shelves on land or other larger icebergs in the water. When those icebergs break off, they float in the denser saltwater ocean because they’re made of less-dense fresh water and are also part air, part water.

  What starts as the tip of an iceberg doesn’t always stay as the tip. Even though more of an iceberg is under than above water, they have the propensity to “roll” or flip sides from top-to-bottom, especially when calving or when parts of the ice begin to melt. Birds, some sources say, are known to take flight just before the motion begins. They can sense, it seems, that something big is beginning to happen; they feel the ever-present risk that what’s below will soon be on the surface of things.

  It is a risk, and not just for birds but for boats and for other animals, fish, and plants living in the ocean, and even for nearby land. In a 2012 study, physicist J. C. Burton and a team of researchers set out to understand the effects of flipping icebergs on the ocean. Working with plastic models that replicated the weight and density of real icebergs but that could be studied in a laboratory water tank, Burton and his team studied the waves once the models flipped. A rolling one-kilometer iceberg, they learned, can cause land to shake as if there were an earthquake. The iceberg’s motion releases the same amount of energy as an atomic bomb.

  I see an image of one of these upside-down icebergs in Smithsonian magazine.
The photo was taken by filmmaker Alex Cornell, who was vacationing with his family in Antarctica. The iceberg is blue, gray, and black, and its glassy surfaces rise toward a small pinnacle but reflect dark in the water, against a backdrop of nearly white mountains and wholly white sky.

  John Isaacs first gave up on his idea of towing icebergs because he didn’t know how a boat might attach lines to the ice or where the underwater tow would go. Six or seven years after his seminar at Scripps, however, he returned to the idea, practicing on six-hundred-pound blocks of ice and suggesting, after finding out that small icebergs had once been taken to Peru by adding sails, that sails might be added to larger icebergs too, to help guide their journey. Isaacs estimated that it would take about two hundred days and cost about a million dollars, with the first five days spent simply getting the iceberg moving at half a knot.

  Isaacs’s wasn’t the only towing plan. In his 2011 Atlantic piece “The Many Failures and Few Successes of Zany Iceberg Towing Schemes,” Alexis Madrigal details a range of iceberg towing schemes from 1825 onward, including plans to convey “by means of pipes and air-pumps, the sea breeze to London,” plans to fit a large screw through an iceberg, and plans to wrap an iceberg “in sail cloth and plastic” and tug it behind a ship.

  In the Emirates Iceberg Project video, two large boats sail around the squared edges of an animated iceberg. Attached to the backs of the boats is what appears to be a giant net, maybe metal, that looks like a fence. The white boats circle closer and closer until the iceberg is surrounded with the fenced material. With a giant rope attached to the fencing, one of the boats begins to pull and the animated iceberg begins moving through the water.

  The thing is, towing an iceberg isn’t as simple as it sounds. Or perhaps it is as simple as it sounds, which is to say not at all. Icebergs are unwieldy, generally 80 percent or more underwater. To make the cost and trip worth it, the icebergs Isaacs and the Emirates Iceberg Project proposed towing would have to be huge, several kilometers in size. Of course, there are problems beyond even the basic concerns of feasibility; all these plans raise important questions about the environmental impact in Antarctica, economic cost—between $100 million and $500 million, many estimate—and the effect on plant and animal life caught up en route. And there’s the question too of whether the icebergs would even make it across the water before breaking up in the Southern Ocean’s strong undercurrents.

  Along with aquariums and educational displays, the Scripps Institute displays photos of glacial ice: the Upper Glacier in Argentina, the Muir Glacier in Alaska, the Larsen Ice Shelf at the South Pole, the Franz Josef Glacier in New Zealand, and the Pasterz Glacier in Austria. The first photo, of the Upper Glacier, was taken in 1928. It’s a black-and-white photo with two snowcapped mountains in the distance and a field of white ice in the foreground. Just below that photo is another shot taken from the same angle. The mountains are still there, but in the place where there was once ice, there’s only water. The photos of Alaska’s Muir Glacier—dated 1941 and 2002—show the same change: one photo with ice, another with water. In New Zealand’s Franz Josef Glacier, there’s ice in both the 1867 and the 2002 photos; the difference is just the amount of ice. In the older photo, the ice stands imposing, a massive wall in front of a mountain range; in the newer photo, the ice is present only in a valley between the mountains. The Austrian Pasterz Glacier is present in the 1850 photo and completely gone in the 2004 photo.

  Photos of the North Pole and the South Pole are taken from space. In the North Pole shot, the ice that used to touch Asia is now far from it. In the South Pole photo, the Larsen C Ice Shelf has changed from a fairly solid line of white to hundreds, maybe thousands, of fragments—icebergs—floating away from the continent.

  One photo, the largest in the display, has no precursor. Dated 2005 and labeled “Greenland River of Ice Melt,” the image shows five or six people in the distance, on the snowy bank of what appears to be a winding river. There are low clouds, but otherwise the entire back of the frame is a wide expanse of ice, white in some spots, brown in others. Where the people stand, the river is perhaps five or six feet across. By the time it hits the bottom edge of the frame, it’s widened to ten or twelve feet, maybe more. The water is sun-streaked near the people, but it grows darker in front of them as the walls of ice around it grow higher and the water plummets between them.

  I study these photos for some time. Eventually I keep walking and turn to see what else the institute holds. Not far from the glacier photos is another display on carbon dioxide emissions. I almost pass it by before I notice its title: “The Human Volcano.”

  The first night we’re in California, my father and I wander to the beach. My mother has stayed back at the cottage we’re renting, reading a book by the fireplace. It’s early evening, just before sunset. We’re staying only two blocks from the ocean but still aren’t sure the nearest path to get to it. We cross a busy street and wander through a narrow lane filled with houses and then down a steeply pitched road. As if on purpose—just the right place, just the right time, in that exact space—there are wooden steps at the end of the road, maybe public, maybe private, we don’t know, but they lead straight onto the sand. My father and I follow them.

  The beach is a mix of sand and rocks. The sand is wet and smooth from the incoming tide. The rocks too are smooth and dark, some covered in bright green layers of algae, others higher and dry. A name is carved into one of the rocks, though the first few letters are too washed out to make out. Just above the name is a sketched numeral thirteen.

  My dad and I walk for a while until we find our way to a broad flat stone. The water laps up, almost onto it. Lines of white waves crest not far off in the distance. Two young boys appear to be learning to surf nearby, but otherwise it’s quiet. Narrow clouds broken up by a scattering of white and yellow sky meet the waves. In the photograph I take of this scene, my thinning father will become a dim outline, backlit by all that sky. “Dad, San Diego” I’ll write below the photograph when I get home.

  I don’t remember what my thoughts were when I took that photograph or even when I looked out over the Pacific Ocean. I’m certain I did not think of icebergs that day, did not imagine giant salt-splashed ships in the distance, moving in from the Arctic or the Antarctic, towing on the water toward us mountains or hills or just blocks of ice—or what remained of the ice, after miles at sea—pinned or fenced or wrapped or pulled behind them. I did not imagine ships colliding with ice, tipping in one quick, or maybe impossibly slow, motion, splitting at the hull and sinking into the sea. As I looked out at the waves I didn’t wonder what sonar sounds like, whether, as I will read in an encyclopedia entry sometime later, it “squeals, pops, and creaks” from all that cracking ice.

  Can we grieve, I wonder now, what we have not yet lost, those losses that are still to come? Are they just under the surface waiting to be struck, or do they stretch out before us, early evening tides, dispatches landing on our shores?

  There was no ice off the coast that day in California, only my father and I and the fading light, rippling on the surface of water.

  In 2003—fourteen years before the news about the Emirates Iceberg Project—the Smithsonian profiles the Norseman, a 4,600-ton ship, and its captain, Jerome Baker. The ship is 270 feet long and has 9,600 horsepower. Baker and the Norseman run the seas near St. John’s, Newfoundland, for a month at a time. Some of Baker’s work involves ferrying gear and supplies. The rest of the time he tows icebergs out of the way of a North Atlantic oil company.

  “It’s no big deal,” he says about spotting icebergs in his path; “it’s all part of the job.”

  A couple of years later, thinking back on that trip to California and John Isaacs’s iceberg proposal, I will open a map on my computer to try to calculate the route an iceberg might take, or the route Isaacs might have imagined that it would. “Sorry,” the mapping search tells me in response to my query, “we could not calculate directions from ‘Antarctica’ to ‘San Clemente,
California.’”

  THE SPEED OF FALLING

  On the simplest level, the speed of falling is the acceleration of gravity times time, or velocity = 9.81m/s2 × time.

  I imagine it went something like this: he was running, bounding up the trail, two steps at a time, one leg moving forward while the other was finding its footing, getting into place. I imagine it was perpetual motion, his hips flexing, his knees rotating, the long contours of his lateral muscles not once losing the tempo’s pace. His steps were lanky and light, his breaths fixed and stable, his lungs forcing the air out of his diaphragm, elevating his ribs in quick one-two one-two bursts. His shoulders were square at first to the ground, but when the mountain became steeper they took a fifteen- then thirty-degree angle. His mouth was open, but he leaned into the rhythm, into the hike, into his early twenties body, a body that could do anything, that could feel nothing, nothing but the heat of movement, of hot hope on a June day. It was hot. He was hot, so hot he’d already taken off his light spring jacket; he was wearing it like a belt around his waist.

  I imagine that he went fast, so fast that sweat gathered around his short, light hair in the way that it often did, beginning at his scalp and moving out, across his barely receding hairline. I imagine that water beaded on his face, on the edges of the contoured lenses of his glasses. It stung his eyes and pooled in the un-tanned creases on the backs of his legs, soaked through his shirt, left a dark cross at the intersection of his spine and his shoulder blades. I imagine that sweat dripped off him onto the dry ground, one drop at a time until there were drops trailing behind each of his quick steps, falling off his body in perfect translucent circles, landing for a moment before soaking into the grass or the dirt or the long expanses of rock. I imagine that there were hundreds of drops up that mountain and then thousands. I imagine that if we’d known soon enough to track them, they might have led us, like a constellation of tiny stars, like disappearing swimming pools.