#REAL ICEBERG UNDERWATER FREE#

In the case of this jewel-like iceberg, the ice is probably very old. Melting can trigger calving, but it can also change the equilibrium of an iceberg, causing it to flip. Because of the varying densities of ice and saltwater, only about 10 percent of an iceberg will ever show at the surface, and that protruding tip will gather dirt and snow. Icebergs form when chunks of freshwater ice calve-or break off-from glaciers and ice shelves, as well as other icebergs.

#REAL ICEBERG UNDERWATER FREE#

Whereas most iceberg tips are covered in snow or have been weathered by the elements, this one was free of debris, exposing glassy, aqua-green ice with water flowing through it-“almost like an ant colony,” he says.Ĭornell’s guide suggested that the iceberg had recently flipped. “This particular iceberg at the time kind of blended in with all the crazy stuff we were seeing.”īut as they approached the mass, which rose about 30 feet out the water, Cornell understood his guide’s excitement. “Everything I was seeing was pretty exciting,” Cornell admits. While exploring Cierva Cove, a glacial bay off the peninsula, a scientist aboard Cornell's boat became excited by one iceberg in particular. “Everything is reflective and everything’s white,” recalls filmmaker Alex Cornell, who vacationed there last month with his family. “People had said that the first time you go, you’re kind of so overwhelmed that you take a lot of pictures of your feet and you don’t really know what’s going on … I definitely felt that,” he says with a laugh. Between the sun, the water and icy peaks, the beauty can be quite literally blinding. In all likelihood, the iceberg that sank the Titanic didn't even endure to the outbreak of World War I, a lost splash of freshwater mixed in imperceptibly with the rest of the North Atlantic.Snow-covered icebergs dominate the scene near the shore of the Antarctic Peninsula, the northernmost part of the icy south polar region. That means it likely broke off from Greenland in 1910 or 1911, and was gone forever by the end of 1912 or sometime in 1913. The average life expectancy of an iceberg in the North Atlantic is only about two to three years from calving to melting.

Such a temperature was of course lethally cold for all those passengers who had been forced to take to the open water to escape the sinking ship.īut such temperatures are far too warm to sustain icebergs for very long. The water temperature on the night of the Titanic sinking was thought to be about 28 degrees Fahrenheit, just below freezing. 15, 1912, the iceberg was some 5,000 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Of the 15,000 to 30,000 icebergs calved each years by the Greenland glaciers, probably only about 1 percent of them ever make it all the way to the Atlantic. The Titanic iceberg was one of the lucky ones, so to speak, as the vast, vast majority of icebergs melt long before they reach that far south. Starting on the Greenland coast, it would have moved from Baffin Bay to the Davis Strait and then onto the Labrador Sea and, at last, the Atlantic. We know that because the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, rather than the Arctic, which means the currents must have taken it far south of where it was calved.

Image: Russell Huff and Konrad Steffen/CIRES/University of Colorado/NASAīut once all that's done, the iceberg's life was a short one.

Real iceberg underwater