Fog often forms around icebergs when the air surrounding them is very cold but the water is quite warm. As the water evaporates, it condenses when it meets the cold air. It is thought that the ocean liner Titanic, which sank on its maiden voyage when it struck an iceberg in 1912, may have been in an area where icebergs were hidden from view by the dense fog surrounding them.
An iceberg is a large piece of freshwater ice that has broken off a glacier or an ice shelf and is floating freely in open (salt) water. Small bits of disintegrating icebergs are called “growlers” or “bergy bits”.
Much of an iceberg is below the surface which led to the expression “tip of the iceberg” to illustrate a small part of a larger unseen issue. Icebergs are considered a serious maritime hazard. The 1912 loss of the “unsinkable” RMS Titanic led to the formation of the International Ice Patrol in 1914.
Icebergs calved by glaciers that face the open sea, such as in Greenland, are irregular shaped piles. In Antarctica, ice shelves calve large tabular (table top) icebergs. The biggest iceberg ever recorded was Iceberg B-15A which split off the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica in 2000.
Before the early 1910s, although there had been many fatal sinkings of ships by icebergs, there was no system in place to track icebergs to guard ships against collisions. In 1907, SS Kronprinz Wilhelm, a German liner, had rammed an iceberg and suffered a crushed bow, but was still able to complete her voyage. The advent of steel ship construction led designers to declare their ships “unsinkable”.
The April 1912 sinking of the Titanic, which killed 1,518 of its 2,223 passengers and crew, discredited this claim. For the remainder of the ice season of that year, the United States Navy patrolled the waters and monitored ice flow. In November 1913, the International Conference on the Safety of Life at Sea met in London to devise a more permanent system of observing icebergs. Within three months the participating maritime nations had formed the International Ice Patrol (IIP). The goal of the IIP was to collect data on meteorology and oceanography to measure currents, ice-flow, ocean temperature, and salinity levels. They monitored iceberg dangers near the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and provided the “limits of all known ice” in that vicinity to the maritime community. The IIP published their first records in 1921, which allowed for a year-by-year comparison of iceberg movement.
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