Every town has to have a festival and St. Anthony has its iceberg festival in June. The majority of the icebergs come from about 100 iceberg producing glaciers along the Greenland coast while a few originate in the eastern Canadian Arctic islands. While on our cruise on the Gaffer 3 the crew scooped up some iceberg chunks for us to see and taste. It was amazing to hold a piece of ice that may be over 15,000 years old!?!
Icebergs are the edges of a glacier that has broken off and slipped into the ocean. The glacier has been thousands of years of snow building up and gradually it flows towards the ocean under its own weight and eventually slips in. The current off Labrador brings them to the Newfoundland coast after a two year journey from Greenland. Once they are to Newfoundland they rarely last a couple of months in the warmer waters.
We were dressed in our foul weather gear complete with long undies....many others were cold but we sailors were prepared.
We motored for a good five miles out in the Atlantic to see this berg.....about the size of an aircraft carrier and about 6 stories tall. It is very hard to believe how big these icebergs can be and what we see is "only the tip of the iceberg." This expression is explained as follows: Icebergs float because the density of ice is lower than that of seawater. The ratio of these densities tells us that 7/8 of the iceberg 's mass must be below the water. Usually they protrude underwater so that they are 20-30% longer than they appear from above the surface. The average depth of the berg is slightly less than its apparent length above water.
The bluish streaks of clear, bubble free ice often seen in icebergs results from the refreezing of melt water which fills crevasses formed in the glacier as it creeps over land. The ice is blue because of the natural light scattering characteristics of pure ice. The first massive berg that we saw had some dark streaks throughout and these are formed from airborne dust or dirt that was eroded from the land and ends up on the glacier surface.
It is hard to describe what it is like to see icebergs up close but they are truly quite beautiful. Sometimes you see coloured streaks, caves and tunnels, old and new waterline notches, even objects such as boulders or birds are seen on icebergs. What would be truly spectacular is the occasion of an iceberg calving and rolling which evidently can be heard a long way away.
Some facts you may find interesting:
-Icebergs are comprised of pure,fresh water.
-Icebergs float because the density of ice is less than sea water.
-It takes an iceberg about two to three years to reach the island of Newfoundland from Greenland, a distance of 1,800 miles.
-The average iceberg weight for the Grand Banks is one to two hundred tonnes.
-Ice harvested from icebergs is often used to make products that boast purity and superior quality, such as vodka and some beers. Rob was anxious to try the pure beer.
-Hibernia, an oil platform off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, is designed to withstand the impact of an iceberg in excess of five million tonnes.
