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WONDERS OF NATURE
Icebergs. Nature miracle
“The ship was sailing 270 meters from the ice shelf, when a huge block weighing about a million tons broke off from its edge with a loud crack. pieces of it kept breaking off, and it became smaller and smaller. When the roar subsided, in the midst of numerous white fragments there remained a beautiful blue mountain, like the core of a flower among sleeping petals. The well-known Australian polar explorer, the conqueror of the South Magnetic Pole and the Earth's southernmost volcano - Erebus - Douglas Mawson, describes the picture of the birth of an iceberg in such a poetic and at the same time documentary way.
Terrible floating ice mountains are huge masses of ice that have broken off from glaciers sliding into the sea or broken off, as Mawson describes, from the edges of giant ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland. the surface of the sea comes at this time into great excitement, and the waves formed are so great that they capsize boats and throw small fishing vessels far away. The word "iceberg" is translated into Russian as "ice mountain". This is no exaggeration, since icebergs really reach enormous sizes. In the ocean there were ice giants tens and even hundreds of kilometers long and hundreds of meters high. Back in 1854-1864, scientists for ten years followed the movement of a giant iceberg, which had a length of 120 kilometers and a height of 90 meters. And in 1927, an ice island was noticed from a Norwegian whaling ship, reaching a length of 170 kilometers. But the largest iceberg was discovered in Antarctic waters in 1956. Its length was 385, and its width was 111 kilometers. In terms of area, it was equal to almost half of a country like Slovenia, or three Luxembourg! And the highest iceberg was met in 1904 off the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. The height of the peak of this ice mountain was 450 meters! Icebergs are native to the Arctic and Antarctic. The glaciers of Greenland, Svalbard, Franz Josef Land and the islands of Canada annually set sail up to eighteen thousand ice islands. Five to six times more of them break off from the coast of Antarctica. Due to the fact that ice is lighter than water, and also due to air bubbles in ice crystals, icebergs have good buoyancy. At the same time, only one eighth of the ice mountain is visible on the sea surface, the rest of its mass is under water. Therefore, icebergs are driven by the force of sea currents, not air currents, and often swim against the wind and even through ice fields up to two meters thick. Woe to a ship frozen in such an ice field - an iceberg will crush it like a matchbox! Large lakes are often found on the surface of flat icebergs, sometimes up to twenty kilometers in diameter. On such ice islands there are also rivers and streams flowing into the sea with beautiful waterfalls. One of these rivers reached a length of four kilometers and a depth of twelve meters. Sea water washes deep tunnels and caves in icebergs. Sometimes, however, the caves go to the ice mountain "inherited" from the glacier that gave birth to it. The cracks formed during the movement of ice tongues along the mountain slopes can then close at the top if the glacier enters the plain, and then long subglacial cavities remain inside it, which eventually approach the coast and go along with the ice block containing them on a long voyage. The interior of these sub-glacial, or, more precisely, "intra-ice", caves is a spectacle of amazing beauty. Here is what one of the participants of the Soviet Antarctic expedition of 1965 says about this: "A round corridor about three meters high went into the depths of the ice mountain. The wavy walls were made of smooth, precisely polished ice. An unusual bluish-blue light passed through the entire ice massif, gently flowing, shimmering in the ice walls. Reflections of light that penetrated the ice played on the icicles. into the entrance hole. The fantastic blue color of the walls, the play of light, the steam escaping from the mouth in clubs, tuned in to a solemn mood. We involuntarily spoke in a whisper and slowly walked along the corridor ... The passages branching in all directions pierced the iceberg, and the most amazing thing about them was huge ice crystals that hung from the ceiling and completely covered the walls, it was a frost, similar to that which can be seen on the windows on a frosty day, only magnified many times over. Ice needles, like flowers of the most bizarre forms, sparkled and sparkled in the blue diffused light. It was terrible not only to move, but also to breathe among this unusually fragile and indescribable beauty. We lit the matches, and they suddenly burst into a bright red flame. Of course, the fire from the lit match seemed so bright in contrast to the bluish illumination of the cave, but that didn't make it any less beautiful..." Once, our sailors met even a "singing" iceberg off the coast of Antarctica. Water washed through holes in it, in which the wind arranged rather melodic "concerts", as if playing on a huge flute. Sometimes icebergs resemble the outlines of medieval castles or watchtowers. They are called pyramidal. But more often there are flat, so-called table icebergs. Sometimes there are also colored floating islands: black, green or yellow. It is believed that the reason for the unusual color of the icebergs is the volcanic dust covering them. Interestingly, floating ice mountains can be found not only in the seas and oceans. In the Tien Shan, at the foot of the majestic Khan Tengri peak, there is a glacial lake called Merzbacher. When a scientific expedition first came to the lake in the 1920s, its members were surprised to see, off the coast of Greenland, that large icebergs were floating on the lake, apparently detached from the Inylchek glacier that formed the lake. One of the scientists of the expedition described the picture he saw as follows: "Icebergs, sparkling in the rays of the southern sun, floated in the water. Ice towers and castles, covered with snow and burning in the sun with myriads of snow crystals, translucent grottoes on the surface of icebergs, hanging icicles playing with all the colors of the rainbow - all this created a fabulous impression." Icebergs have always posed a serious threat to ships. Especially dangerous in this regard are Greenland icebergs, which are driven by winds and currents to the south, to the shores of North America, where busy shipping lanes lie. Moreover, if in March the ice mountains reach only the island of Newfoundland, after which they melt and disappear, then in October they sometimes reach the latitude of New York, creating a dangerous obstacle on the way of transoceanic liners traveling from Europe to the USA and back. The danger is aggravated by the fact that in this area the cold Labrador Current meets the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, which causes thick and prolonged fogs. Meanwhile, icebergs up to 20-30 meters high (the majority of them in the North Atlantic), even on a clear night, are distinguishable only from a distance of 500-600 meters, which does not allow the captain, even if he ordered "Full back!", to avoid a collision with a fatal obstacle . Everyone remembers the catastrophe that occurred in 1912, which ended in the death of the world's largest passenger liner, the Titanic. Its captain managed to get away from the frontal impact, and only struck a side along the edge of the icy mountain, but, nevertheless, the iceberg pierced six of the fourteen compartments of the ship, and two hours later the Titanic sank, killing one and a half thousand people. The greatest maritime disaster of the 1913th century forced the maritime powers to take action to avoid similar tragedies in the future. As a result, in XNUMX the International Ice Patrol in the North Atlantic was created. Patrol boats and aircraft monitor the appearance of icebergs and warn passing ships by radio. During the year, the patrol reveals up to four hundred dangerous ice mountains, on which special radio beacons are installed or their surface is painted with bright orange paint. However, even patrolling does not give a full guarantee of avoiding collisions. So, already today, in 1959, the Danish ship "Hans Hedhof" crashed into an iceberg in the fog and sank with all passengers and crew. 95 people died. The danger is also approaching at close range to the floating ice mountain. Icebergs melting from below gradually lose their stability and can suddenly roll over, destroying an inadvertently approaching ship. The tipping of the iceberg was observed from the ship "Ob" in the Davis Sea, and eyewitnesses describe this event as follows: “In calm weather, there was a strong roar, comparable in strength to an artillery salvo. Those on deck saw at a distance of no more than one kilometer a slowly overturning pyramidal iceberg about forty meters high. Huge blocks of ice broke off from its surface and fell into the water with a roar. When the surface part of the iceberg sank noisily into the water, a rather large swell began to diverge from it, causing the ship to roll. On the surface of the sea, among the wreckage, a new hilly and uneven top of the iceberg slowly swayed. Many large icebergs live in the sea for several years. In the Antarctic, they are often inhabited by large colonies of penguins and other seabirds. Some even make nests there. The durability of icebergs gave people the idea to try using them to supply fresh water to arid countries in Africa and Arabia. Thus, a project arose to tow large icebergs by special ships to the shores of the Persian Gulf in order to use the water formed during their melting for water supply and irrigation of fields. It has been calculated that the amount of water generated by the melting of one medium-sized iceberg is equal to the annual flow of a large river. Time will tell how realistic the implementation of such a project will be. During stormy weather, ships sailing off the coast of Antarctica often use icebergs to protect themselves from raging waves, sheltering on their leeward side from the storm. And pilots of Antarctic expeditions sometimes choose their flat surface as a landing strip. Of course, at the same time, one must always remember the insidious nature of the ice islands and be on the alert. After all, the behavior of icebergs is unpredictable and at any moment you can expect a surprise from it. This is how an iceberg once "joked" with the Canadian steamer "Porscia". It happened in 1893. The Portia was on a cruise with a large group of tourists on board, when suddenly a floating ice mountain appeared ahead of us. The passengers asked the captain to come closer - the iceberg was too beautiful, they wanted to get a better look at it and take a close-up photograph. But as soon as the ship sailed close to the iceberg and the tourists snapped their cameras, something incomprehensible happened. An unknown force began to lift the Portia out of the water. In a few seconds, the ship was already above the surface of the sea on a huge iceberg ledge, which had previously been under water. Apparently, the ice mountain was swaying in the water, and as the steamer approached it, the slope allowed the ship to pass over the underwater cornice. Then the iceberg began to roll in the other direction and lifted the steamer into the air. Fortunately, this didn't last long. When the iceberg leaned back again, the ship was in the water without even receiving minor damage. At full speed, the captain steered the ship away, away from the ice trap. The passengers did not even want to think about what could happen if the iceberg turned over. I must say that, despite the well-deserved gloomy fame, icebergs make a striking impression on the traveler who sees them for the first time with their kind of unearthly, fabulously romantic beauty. Their forms can be the most bizarre and unusual: either it is a giant snow-white swan or a hilly island with wide valleys, in which only a cozy village is missing, or an island with high mountains, gorges, waterfalls and sheer cliffs that form beautiful, picturesque bays. There are icebergs that look like a ship with wind-blown sails, a column on a beautiful pedestal, a pyramid, an ancient city with walls, turrets and drawbridges... And those who happened to see their fantastic outlines on the dark surface of the sea, reminiscent of floating enchanted castles, white-blue, blue-green or pink at sunset, will never forget this majestic and beautiful sight. Author: B.Wagner
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