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Iceberg Meeting
Thu Nov 27, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi. I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. It's not just ocean liners like the Titanic
that are in danger from hitting icebergs. Robin White tells us even ice-breakers need to be
cautious.
In the Northern Hemisphere most icebergs come from glaciers in Greenland, which calve pieces
off into the sea. They may float around for years before disappearing. You'd think if any ship
could shrug off an iceberg it would be an icebreaker. Not so. Curtis Shaw was Marine Science
Officer aboard the 400' ship, The Polar Sea.
CS: It causes great havoc when you throw the dishes around down below when you hit ice at 15
knots
And it's not just the dishes that get broken. Even the 1 3/4 inch thick steel hull on the
Polar Sea is vulnerable to icebergs…
CS: They're hard; they're big. They have more mass than we do. It's… a fresh water cube,
which is a very hard piece of ice that can damage the ship. It's like a piece of steel out
there almost and we avoid them.
Shaw says icebreakers are meant to ram through salt water ice floes that are relatively soft
and thin compared to icebergs that can be the size of buildings. But it's not just icebergs
that lurk underwater. Icebreakers have to watch out for something much more solid.
CS: On two of my watches … I came across islands that were uncharted. That's fascinating to
me that in today's day and age that there is anything out there that we don't know
about…
The low islands were hidden by perennial ice, snow and thick fog. And there may be many more
waiting to be found by the next icebreaker.
Our show is funded by grants from Subaru and The National Science Foundation. Thanks today to
the entire Weather Notebook staff, Doug Sanborn, Melody Nester, Sean Doucette, and Peter
Crane.
Today's Links
Visit the U.S. Coast Guard\'s Polar Sea:
http://www.uscg.mil/pacarea/polarsea/science.htm
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